Code Compass

## Inspiration

I'm a 25-year electrician. My father was a master electrician who never taught me a thing — I had to fight for every scrap of code knowledge while companies got paid off my back. The trades run on gatekeeping: knowledge drip-fed over four-year apprenticeships, locked in $200 courses, priced out of reach of the people bending the pipe. I built the tool I needed at 19 and never got. Then I went further: I built the whole company the same way — one human, an AI team, nobody's permission.

What it does

Code Compass answers any electrical code question the way you'd ask a foreman — "kitchen counter receptacle spacing?" — and returns the plain-English rule plus the exact NEC article and page to open in your own code book, across four code editions (2017/2020/2023/2026). Every answer ships with working assumptions and verification notes, because in this trade a wrong answer can burn a building down — the AI shows its uncertainty instead of hiding it. It also generates timed drills and 25-question journeyman practice tests with citation-backed answer keys. It doesn't just answer — it teaches code navigation, the skill the licensing exam actually tests. $1.99/month.

How we built it

Gemini Flash is the product's reasoning engine — every NEC answer, explanation, and practice question, wrapped in domain guardrails (4-step Codeology method, citation requirements, "open your book and verify"). The company itself is AI-native: I set direction and approve everything outbound; AI agents do the rest. Hermes (local coding agent) owns the codebase — TanStack Start/React, Supabase auth, Stripe, Vercel deploys. Viktor (autonomous AI coworker) owns QA, growth, outreach, analytics, video production, and revenue monitoring. The agents hand work to each other through written specs.

Challenges we ran into

A production deploy shipped with a blank Supabase URL and took the site down overnight — the AI team diagnosed it, redeployed, added a prebuild guard that fails any build missing critical env vars, and put the site under twice-daily automated uptime monitoring, all before 11 AM while I was at my day job. An autonomous QA walk of the guest funnel discovered the site had no purchase path at all before paid traffic arrived — the agent filed the exact fix list and checkout shipped the next day. And doing all of this while working a day job, on a Chromebook, with no team and no funding.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Recurring revenue is live: the first paying Founding Member subscribed at $1.99/mo within 36 hours of the offer shipping. An autonomous QA matrix (4 real code questions × 2 roles × 2 NEC editions) passed 8/8 with real citations. Analytics shows organic referrals arriving from gemini.google.com and perplexity.ai — AI search engines already recommend the product. A complete 27-second promo video was produced end-to-end by an AI agent with zero human editing. Every outreach email, the UTM attribution schema, and the launch posts: AI-drafted, human-approved.

What we learned

AI-native operations collapse the cost structure until a "too small" market becomes viable for one person. A journeyman-exam tool for electricians could never support a conventional team — but the marginal cost of a QA pass, a promo video, or a nightly revenue check is now roughly zero. Gemini makes the product possible; the agent team makes the company possible. The other lesson: ship, verify against production, and let the agents catch what you can't.

What's next for Code Compass

The first 500 Founding Members tune the roadmap. The same engine follows a tradesman's whole career: aptitude-test prep before the apprenticeship, code navigation and exam prep during it, field calculations (motor calcs, conduit fill, bend multipliers) on the job, and the business knowledge to go independent. Long-term: heads-up AR guidance on the jobsite — see where to mark and bend the pipe. The future of the trades starts here: codecompass.work

Built With

• ai-agents
• gemini
• posthog
• react
• stripe
• supabase
• tanstack
• typescript
• vercel