Tristan V
Founder - AI Builder - Solo Operator
Founder of TrendAI, HappyHome, and MaxLearn. I automate what most companies hire for, and write about the tools, workflows, and thinking behind it. Every article on TrendMedia comes from something I've built or broken firsthand.
Articles by Tristan V
TrendAIThe Price of Being One Person
The market has settled on retainers and hybrid pricing for AI agencies. It has almost nothing to say about the cost that actually matters to one person: the hours spent finding out that something confident was wrong. Here is what a solo operator is really selling.
TrendAIFive Sprints and Not One User
Five sprints of modelling a client’s business from their documents produced a deployed portal and not one user. The fix was to stop building the system I had modelled and digitise the one they already run — starting with the single place a person was doing the same work twice.
TrendAIThe Only Email They Never Answered
A sales email arrived on 2 September for a subscription I cancelled three weeks earlier. The same inbox has owed me twenty-four dollars and fifty cents since 9 August. Both are handled by the same company, and only one of them moves.
TrendAIThe Desk Stopped Being the Bottleneck
Last sprint closed 34 stories in seven days, and every one of them needed me in one specific chair. This week that stopped being true. What changed was not the agents getting better. It was the chair becoming optional.
TrendAIA Stack I Could Actually Add Up
Two weeks ago I left a platform because I couldn’t calculate what it would cost. The replacement came in at about A$33 per client per month — and the method that got there was listing the capabilities before naming a single vendor.
TrendAIThe Test That Graded the Wrong Thing
I confirmed the Cal.com API returns arrays. It does — and my node was still broken. The same week a measuring tool returned 53.3 and 35.7 for the same unchanged page. Two questions I now ask before trusting a green check.
TrendAIThe All-in-One That Couldn’t Be Priced
On 9 August I left GoHighLevel, and twelve hours of working build went with it. Not because the software was bad — because after every answer arrived I still couldn’t compute what one client would cost. The rule that came out of it, and what leaving actually cost.
TrendAIBuild the SOP They Have
For five sprints I built a system nobody used — clean models, mock data, zero users. The fix wasn’t a better design. It was building the process the client already runs today, then improving it with the person who does the job. Why SOP-first digitisation gets adopted when a remake doesn’t.
TrendAIEmbracing Our Ancestral Health: My Personal Journey to Reclaim Vitality Through Natural Practices
Three packets of medication sit in a drawer I never open — prescribed in February 2024, never filled. This is the story of what I did instead: a 5-day fast, OMAD, whole foods, daily cold showers, daily walks. Two years on, blood pressure normalised, weight under 70kg, every marker in range.
TrendAICase Study #1 — Audit-Ready Before Day One
Two months ago HappyHome was a name on a slide. Six operator hours and two sprints later, the venture’s compliance posture sits at 77 evidence rows across 7 domains, every gap owned. This is the inverted compliance stack — what an AI operating system does when you point it at a regulated launch.
TrendAIThe One-Man Agile Team
For decades, shipping serious software was a team sport — product, dev, QA, DevOps, the lot. Not anymore. After building my own AI operating system and a one-person development process on top of it, I now run full software projects — designed, built, tested, deployed, monitored — completely solo. Here’s how the leverage moved.
TrendAIAutomating NDIS Progress Notes: The 55% Admin Saving Most Providers Are Missing
NDIS support workers spend ~45 minutes per day on progress notes. AI assist drops it to ~20 — a 55% reduction backed by sector data. Here’s the kitchen-table walkthrough, the labour-cost math at scale, and the one rule to demand from any AI tool before you sign.
TrendAIBuild Log #3: Sprint “Rảnh Tay” Đầu Tiên
Năm ngày — ship được nhiều hơn bốn tuần trước cộng lại. Sprint đầu tiên mà tôi không phải giải thích lại tôi là ai, đang xây gì, hay các doctrine đã đồng ý. Sau nhiều tháng ghi chép, agent đã có đủ context — và hướng dẫn của tôi có thể ngắn gọn.
TrendAIThe Sprint System Underneath
Three hours from idea to a live product on Friday — replacing a 3,997-row spreadsheet. Same-day ideation to production. The reason wasn’t a smarter agent. It was six pieces of operating discipline underneath: sprints, lean agile, CI/CD, QA regression, doctrines, persistent agent context.
TrendAIThe TOS Stack — Every Tool, Every Layer
Fifteen weeks of building TrendAI OS in public. Six layers from substrate to dashboard, ten binding doctrines, five venture surfaces, and 116 components live in production. Every tool named. Every layer visible. No flashy demo — the OS itself is the demo.
TrendAIBuild Log #3: First Hands-Free Sprint
Five days. More shipped than the previous four weeks combined. My first sprint where I didn’t have to re-explain who I was, what I was building, or what we’d already decided. After months of writing things down, the agent finally had the context — and instructions could stay short.
TrendAIBuild Log #2: Eight Days, One Spine
Eight days. The flu broke and the fog lifted. By Tuesday, three brands were generating videos from the same pipeline I hadn’t touched a credential file for all week. The agent doesn’t assist with the lean-agile loop anymore. It runs it. Hands-free is no longer an aspiration — it’s the operating mode.
TrendAIBuild Log #1: Three Weeks Off, Two Days On
Three weeks off in Japan. Two days back at the desk. Halfway through the trip I realised I was admiring exactly what I’d been avoiding building back home. This week the fog lifted and the work clicked — not because I worked harder, but because the system finally worked.
TrendAIThe Real OS Underneath
Came back from three weeks off and saw it — my AI agents had nowhere solid to stand. Two focused days later, the foundation underneath my AI Operating System is real: vault, servers, registries, deploys. The boring layer that decides whether the magic above is infrastructure or theatre.
TrendAIAI Operating Systems Are Coming — I Chose to Move First
The AI Operating System category is forming right now — as significant as CRM in the 1990s or ERP in the 2000s. I recognised the pattern early and chose to build first. Here’s why first movers will define the next decade of business.