I build things to understand them.

AI made it easy to try everything and hard to know what to try. The skills that matter now are taste, judgment, and being able to verify what comes back, and building them has changed my life in real, tangible ways. I'm Josiah Bujanda. This is my public workbench: systems, games, instruments, and the notes from building them.

Explore the workbench

A workbench collage: torn paper scraps taped down beside pixel-art character sketches on grid paper, an orbit diagram, a hand-drawn node graph, an isometric block city, and a cardboard arcade cabinet.

Now

6 games onlineNeonrace, Emberfall, Beamwright, Coaster, Math Facts, Cat-A-Vac
One home serverOne URL, no local copies, no app store
Selftest 93/93BrainOS, measured 07.2026
302 decisions loggedEach one kept with its reasoning and the options it beat

The Arcade

We built an arcade this weekend.

Six games. Two kids. One home server. A weekend spent turning screen time into making time.

My kids invent the premise, the characters, and the rules that matter. I help turn those instincts into mechanics, assets, and code.

Every game starts as a copycat of something they love. Somewhere between the paper and the prototype it turns into its own thing, and watching that happen never gets old.

They build it, break it, laugh, and walk away holding a rule nobody taught them. That is the same loop running everywhere else on this site, just louder.

01Invent
02Mechanize
03Build
04Play

Enter the build log

A small cardboard arcade cabinet with a blue body, a red joystick, two red buttons, and a pixel character on its screen.

BrainOS

Measured 07.2026 Store → Recall → Reason Selftest: 93/93 Decisions logged: 302

System

I spent almost forty years losing what I knew.

I remember things by where I was when I learned them: the room, the conversation, the whiteboard. Folders have never once worked that way for me. Decades of notes, OneNote and then Obsidian, kept turning into static buckets I could search but never actually use.

BrainOS digests information the moment it arrives. Capture, compression, and synthesis happen in the same step, so what lands is already the working version, connected to everything it touches, with its provenance attached.

Ideas compete in here, and the ones that survive carry receipts. Models can change. The work remains.

See where this gets applied

Applied

Some systems leave the workbench.

Ten years in commercial lighting controls taught me the information is always there. Somebody just has to hold the drawing, the spec, the addendum, and last Tuesday's email in their head at the same time, and nobody can.

So I built the thing that holds it. Every finding links back to the page it came from. The estimator still makes the call.

$131,573

The misses, itemized: surfaced across $2,691,036 of commercial bids I reviewed. 18 jobs. Money the company had already earned and was about to give away.

Read the applied case study

Field Notes

What the builds reveal.

The builds keep teaching me things I did not go looking for. I write those down here.

The screen is not where finished things come from.

What changed when my children stopped asking what they could play and started asking what they could make.

Build enough things to see the patterns.

I can make almost any idea sound coherent in a document. Software is less polite. Building shows me which parts of an idea are actually true.

A model forgets what it drew one image ago.

The asset-pipeline rule that turned drifting image generations into consistent, game-ready character strips.

The Premise

Premium tinkerer, receipts included.

Games, a memory system, a bid review. They look unrelated. I am studying the same thing in all of them: how understanding forms, how it breaks, and what a tool can do about it.

Understanding is something you rebuild every time you need it, and you can only rebuild it out of what you kept. And when a complicated set of relationships suddenly becomes simple enough to see, that is beauty arriving. Understanding is the shape relationships make.

Design

Ask a better question.

Build

Make the question tangible.

Let the work change you.