The Tagline That Became Real

For a while now, my LinkedIn tagline has been something along the lines of:

“stay at home parent by day, game dev by nap time”

It sounded good. It described what I was doing.

When Valentina was very young, I was able to do programming while she slept:

On the bassinet
Sometimes even on my chest

We have a nanny who helps us a few days during the week, but I still take care of:

The infinite home improvements
Cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner
Cleaning and tidying up the house

All of that meant that doing any sort of dev work was really hard.

Sometimes it meant:

Bringing my noisy laptop to my daughter’s room
Being away in another room keeping an eye on her via the baby monitor

Not ideal.

But something changed.

A Workflow That Worked… But Wasn’t Great

I started noticing a pattern in how I was spending my mental cycles.

While doing chores, while waiting for my daughter to fall asleep… my mind would wander to code.

“What if I structured the system this way?”
“That bug is probably happening because of X”
“The architecture should really be Y instead of Z”

The thinking about code was happening. The designing was happening.

I started writing notes on my phone. System designs. Architecture decisions. Feature ideas.

Whenever I had time, I would take these notes to my computer, copy them over, organize them into tasks, use LLM agents to do initial prototypes and some feature work.

That workflow worked. It was fine. But it was also a waste of time - all that transferring and organizing and context switching.

That workflow changed once I got an initial prototype of my LLM agent-based home assistant working.

Enter Butler IO

It started with something called a “Butler’s Book”.

A Butler’s Book is essentially a book where you keep a lot of info about the house:

Where certain valves are
When filters need to be changed
Things that need to be done every season
And so on

I started it as a git-based project with markdown documents and then used an AI to help me brainstorm some ideas and scaffold some structure.

It worked really well.

But I wanted to have access to it on the go.

So I created an app that allowed me to interface with it via my phone. I could talk to an AI agent about my house, manage tasks, and keep everything organized — all without sitting at a computer.

And then I realized I could use the same approach for my dev projects. I could send instructions from my phone and have an agent do the work on my home server.

All those notes I used to have to transfer over to my computer? I could now just send them straight to their own projects.

I wrote more about this in I Built Claude Code Remote Control Before Anthropic.

Natural Language Programming

Through all of this, I have been studying and practicing different things:

Learning Flutter and Dart
Figuring out what agent-based workflow works well for me
Understanding where AI shines and where it struggles

And I have come to a realization about how I approach development now:

I have transitioned to “natural language programming first” and hands-on programming second.

What does that mean?

I write very detailed designs and architectural instructions.

If you have worked with me before, you know:

I really push for really good documentation
I am always looking for how to improve how I communicate - for myself and for my team

It is no different with this new workflow.

In fact, I think that aspect got even better - supercharged in a way.

When changing features, adding or removing them, it is a lot easier now to also change the documentation to make sure it stays relevant.

Both AIs and I can reference it to plan and make changes.

This doesn’t mean I stopped coding.

It means I am more intentional about when I code:

The routine coding tasks? Those get delegated.
The architectural decisions and tricky edge cases? Those are still mine.

Less Time on the Computer, More Time Living

Here is what this workflow has really given me:

I spend way less time on my computer now.

That means more time improving myself:

As a husband
As a dad
As a homemaker

And I am still doing one of the things I have been doing throughout my whole life - coding.

Actually… I came to realize that it was not coding that I loved all along.

It was creating things.

Looking Forward to What Comes Next!

Now that I am a dad and a stay at home dad, I sort of returned to that feeling I had as a kid - where I would make games for myself and my cousins about our summer adventures.

But now?

Now I am gearing up to make games for my daughter.

And I am already making games for my nephew!

He is 4 years old right now. Together we made a game mode for a game I had made for him.

He looooooved it! ❤️

Soon I will be sharing these games that I have been making.