What I Built in April 2026

Every month I write one of these. Not because anyone asked me to — because shipping without documentation is just noise. This is April.

What Shipped

Grounded In Stone Massage — Tara AI Assistant

Gabe Hodge is a licensed massage therapist in Gallatin Valley, Montana. He needed a website and a way to answer client questions when he's in session with someone.

I built him a full Cloudflare Pages site — dark, botanical aesthetic, hot stone photography, service listings — and wired up an AI assistant named Tara. She lives in the bottom right corner of the site as a floating chat widget. Clients ask about services, pricing, booking, what to expect. Tara answers in real time using Claude Haiku, powered by a Cloudflare Pages Function on the backend.

The naming matters. I don't name these things "AI Bot" or "Virtual Assistant." Tara is named after Green Tara, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion. The site is called Grounded In Stone. The name fits.

What actually shipped:

Full static site with mobile-responsive nav, service cards, hot stone spotlight section, booking section, contact
Six AI-generated and Pexels stock images wired as hero background, accent photos, and a 3-panel photo strip
Green Tara favicon and chat button icon
Tara AI widget with stone-green palette, animated typing indicator, and full Claude Haiku backend
Deployed to groundedinstone.pages.dev via Cloudflare Pages

Stack: HTML/CSS/JS, Cloudflare Pages Functions, Claude Haiku API

galvanizedesigns.com — Nabu UX Backlog

Galvanize Designs is my AI web design agency. The site has Nabu — an AI sales assistant who walks prospective clients through a discovery brief before handing them off to contact.

This month I knocked out the UX backlog:

Interstitial handoff screen — smooth transition between Nabu conversation and the contact form
Discovery Brief carryover — Nabu's summary of the conversation now pre-populates the contact page in a clean 3-column layout
Add-on cards — service add-ons now trigger Nabu conversations instead of dead links
Hero inline panel — the AI conversation starts directly in the hero, no modal

These aren't glamorous features. But they're the difference between a demo and a tool that actually works.

Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Cloudflare Pages, Claude API

GovOpps AI Recon — Live Beta

This is the biggest thing running right now. GovOpps AI Recon is a government contracting intelligence tool that helps small businesses find and evaluate federal contract opportunities.

It's live at govopps-ai-recon.pages.dev. One beta user — Zach Hodge at Hodge Group Investments & Contracting LLC — is actively using it.

The tool is not done. There's a known security issue (IDOR — Insecure Direct Object Reference) that needs to be patched before I bring in a second user. No second user until it's fixed. That discipline matters.

Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Cloudflare Workers, Claude API

Prospectus — Design Complete

This one hasn't shipped yet, but the design is locked.

Prospectus is an AI-powered investment pitch platform I'm building for my father. He's pitching a cemetery development opportunity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — land acquisition, infrastructure, and perpetual care trust setup.

The platform will generate full Oren Klaff-structured pitch decks, serve investors through a voice-guided portal, run a live Granola note-theater during pitch calls, and give the presenter a teleprompter positioned under the webcam so he never breaks eye contact. The CRM will profile each investor using public research and tell my father exactly how to close them.

That's the goal. Design is spec'd. Code starts this week.

What I Learned

Voice changes everything. Adding ElevenLabs voice narration to the Prospectus investor portal wasn't a feature idea I came up with — it came from thinking about who the investors actually are. Older, successful, not interested in reading a screen. They want to be talked to. That one decision reframes the entire product.

Name your AI. Tara isn't just a cute detail. When you give something a name, you give it a personality constraint. The name shapes the writing, the color choices, the greeting message. It makes the product feel intentional instead of assembled.

Security before scale. I could have added a second beta user to Recon AI this month. I chose not to. The IDOR vulnerability means one user could theoretically access another user's data. That doesn't happen on my watch. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

What's Next

Patch the IDOR in Recon AI
Start building Prospectus
Gabriel Hodge's massage therapy site (waiting on photos and pricing from Gabe)
gradyhodge.com blog — you're reading article one

See you next month.