hi, I'm Neil.
I'm a craftsperson, not an evangelist.
I've been prompting every day since GPT-3 launched in the summer of 2020. Five years before anyone needed a job title for it. That much practice teaches you one thing: prompting is a discipline. Not a trick, not a hack. A practice with patterns, archetypes, failure modes — and the shape of it shifts by model, industry, and outcome.
the best prompts look boring.
specificity is a feature, not a style.
what I built
BuildPoolis the tool I kept wishing I had. It's built for two kinds of moment: the fresh project you want to start off on solid ground, and the vibecoded mess five projects deep where your AI has started contradicting itself. Same fix in both cases — describe the project, a team of specialist agents gets hired in real time, each equipped with the tools that suit the job. You walk away with a .buildpool/folder your coding agent can actually read. It doesn't write your code. It writes the briefing your code will be written against. That distinction is the whole product.
about the name
This tool used to be called neil— same name as me, which read as vain even when it wasn't meant that way. I renamed it to BuildPool: the pool of specialists your project draws from. The product is the pool. I'm still the one handcrafting what's in it.
what this isn't
Not a course selling 10× your output. Not a framework evangelizing itself. Not a prompt marketplace. Not beginner material — I respect readers who already use Claude, GPT, Cursor daily and suspect there's more there. And not loud. I ship; I don't quote-tweet my own wins.
handcrafted briefings.
no AI-written this-page.
where to find me
Longer pieces — how prompting shifts model-by-model and industry-by-industry — go out on Substack. Short takes land on X. The product itself, BuildPool, lives on this site; the packs are on Gumroad. No Discord, no newsletter course, no webinar funnel.