January 2026 began with a strange sense of time. I was building for 2026 while the calendar still insisted on 2025. The goal was simple: stop hiding behind stock photos and start building systems that actually do work. By the end of the month, that intention had hardened into a stack of twenty-six repositories, one hundred and eighty-four commits, and a set of products that can handle real data, real users, and real complexity. The code is dense, but it is solid. The year started right.
The first week was about truth and infrastructure. I spent Monday filling in the blanks on the Lavora remodeling site, replacing generic placeholders with real photos of bathroom, exterior, and interior projects. It was eleven images for the bathroom series alone, thirty for the exterior, and twenty for the interior. It felt like the site was finally run by actual people. Tuesday brought three fresh codebases. I scaffolded the CA Retirement Plan Leads Generator across ninety-one files with four hundred and sixty-eight thousand lines added in a single commit. The structure covered Docker, config, database, models, and routers. I also fixed a real OAuth2 issue in the Lavora booking flow, correcting timezone handling so the calendar actually worked.
By Wednesday, the complexity peaked. I wired up the multistate-retirement-leads data ingestion services, handling the specific quirks of New Jersey and Socrata sources. That was over eight hundred and ninety-three lines of new code. The real shift was in how the application handles state filtering. I built an all-states mode with a dropdown for user selection, touching everything from the backend configuration to the frontend API client. Parallel to that, I pushed the LLM enrichment service into the multistate and CA retirement repos. Thursday was about control. I backed up the enrichment pipeline in ca-retirement-leads, swapping nearly a million lines of data to lock the state before rewiring enrichment. I built viewer mode and applied Human Interest branding across the frontend, adjusting layouts, CSS, config, and routing stubs so a read-only surface could be shipped without letting anyone touch ingestion.
I spent Monday filling in the blanks on the Lavora remodeling site, replacing generic placeholders with real photos of bathroom, exterior, and interior projects.
Friday was the heavy lift. I replaced the partial export in ca-retirement-leads with a full database dump, including Form 5500 filers. But the real work was in multistate-retirement-leads. We shipped local AI enrichment using MLX and the Granite 3.3 2B model. That was over four thousand lines across twenty-eight files. It changes how the whole enrichment pipeline works. Instead of leaning on external LLM providers, we can now run enrichment locally. It is faster, cheaper, and gives us control. I rewrote the main router, updated models, added routers for benchmarking and ingestion, and built out the service layer. The week ended with a sense of solidity. I stopped building demos and started building systems.
The second week began with the kind of silence that only exists before code is written. I bootstrapped magic-unicorn-outreach from zero to a working backend in a single commit. The project is a FastAPI service, and I laid down the standard stack: models, routers, config, Dockerfile, the whole works. The commit landed forty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty lines across one hundred and thirteen files. It wasn't a half-baked proof-of-concept. It was a complete backend scaffold with the routers, database layer, models, and configuration all wired together.
By Thursday, the focus shifted from building new foundations to tearing down old ones. I spent the bulk of the day wrestling with the soul of magicunicorn.tech. The site was still wearing its old skin, and it was time to shed it. I pushed a massive overhaul that redefined the entire identity, shifting the focus from a general portfolio to a dedicated technology studio. I touched sixty-nine files, rewriting the narrative and restructuring the architecture. The line counts tell the scale of the mess: twelve thousand, five hundred and thirteen lines added against nearly forty-eight thousand, four hundred and forty-eight removed. It was a total gutting. I stripped out the clutter and built a cleaner, sharper foundation that reflects what the business actually does now.
But while I was busy rebranding the studio, the infrastructure underneath was throwing a tantrum. The ops-center repo was quietly failing to authenticate users in the Human Interest tier. If they cannot log in, the dashboard is useless. The issue was a tangled web of session handling and state refreshes. I dug into the backend APIs and the frontend components that manage the dashboard and marketplace views. The fix required changes across ten files, touching everything from the core server logic to the service workers that cache the app state. I resolved the login hang and ensured that once a user authenticated, the dashboard actually refreshed to show their data. It was a mundane but critical repair. After stabilizing the authentication layer, I had to propagate that fix through the cloud infrastructure. The ops-center submodule in the uc-cloud repo was still pointing to the old, broken version. I updated the submodule reference to pull in the authentication fixes. It was a one-line change in the services directory, but it was the bridge that connected the backend repair to the actual running environment.
The week ended with a heavy push across four repositories. The outreach platform got a massive injection of capability, adding 3D visualizations, GraphRAG, and support for multiple LLM providers. That single commit touched ninety-four files and added nearly thirty-eight thousand lines of code. To make sure the new models were not just guessing, I built out a rigorous benchmarking suite. I wrote scripts to test optimized prompts and ran them against Hermes model, documenting the methodology and results so we are not flying blind. The retirement leads project followed a similar arc. I rolled out Hermes 4 14B support along with CLI enrichment tools and general quality improvements. That commit touched one hundred and twenty-eight files, which is a lot of moving parts to keep stable. I updated the testing documentation to reflect the new Hermes 3 8B results, ensuring the summary tables match the actual performance numbers. It is tedious work, tracking these metrics, but it keeps the product honest. If the model gets worse, the docs will show it before the clients do.
The third week started with a heavy lift in scaffolding and ended with a data browser that actually works. I spent Monday spinning up CenterDeep.ai, pushing fifty-five files for the FastAPI backend, React frontend, and Docker setup. I also gave LoopNet Leads the big treatment, adding Stripe billing, alerts, multi-tenancy, and swapping the license from MIT to Proprietary. Seventy-eight files changed, seventeen thousand and ninety-four lines added. That is the kind of update that makes you pause before merging.
Wednesday was the kind of day where infrastructure gets in your face early. The Adora site's Traefik entrypoint had gone sideways, and I spent the morning fixing the routing configuration. It is always the docker-compose.yaml that hides the simplest mistake, but the fix stuck, and the site started behaving again. Over on the outreach tool, I built out data import and export scripts, plus a batch of LLM enrichment improvements across the discovery router and provider layer. The goal was straightforward: make it easy to move lead data in and out without juggling half a dozen manual steps. Nine files shifted, about five hundred lines of new code, and now there is a clean path for bulk operations instead of the old point-by-point workflow.
Thursday was about shipping the Mac app. I spent most of the day getting magic-unicorn-outreach ready for local execution. The core feature is the MLX local LLM integration. It runs locally
Real product captures — click any to enlarge.