Why I Built CyberWhisper
A story about noise, Extreme Programming, and an input revolution in the age of AI.
A story about noise, Extreme Programming, and an input revolution in the age of AI.
For a long time in my career, I lived by a simple rule:
Don’t say things casually. Saying the wrong thing can be costly.
This wasn’t advice from a book. It was something I learned the hard way, through real work, real teams, and real consequences.
Learning the cost of noise — after my first startup
After my first startup ended, I joined a team that operated in a highly remote setup. My manager at the time was an Israeli engineer named Eiton.
In meetings, he had a phrase he repeated constantly:
“Guys, this is background noise.”
At first, I didn’t fully grasp what he meant.
Over time, I realized how dangerous misunderstanding can be in a remote environment. When there’s no immediate, face-to-face correction, a wrong assumption—once accepted—can quietly propagate through discussions, designs, and implementations.
Eiton was relentless about calling things out:
- What didn’t matter right now
- What was factually wrong
- What sounded relevant but was actually just noise
That was the first time I truly understood something fundamental:
Good communication isn’t about saying more. It’s about knowing what should not be taken seriously.
My first manager and the discipline of Extreme Programming
Early in my career, I met my first manager, Austin. He introduced me to Extreme Programming (XP).
It was a turning point.
Test-first development, fast feedback loops, continuous integration, simple design— XP wasn’t about clever techniques. It was about survival.
At the time, the problem was obvious:
Human mistakes were extremely expensive.
- Writing the wrong code could cost weeks or months
- Misunderstood requirements were hard to recover from
- Refactoring was painful and risky
For years, these ideas formed the operating system of how I built software.
The Web 2.0 years: “Always Beta” made sense
That mindset followed me everywhere—freelancing, open-source work, and later, founding companies.
In my own startup, 8box, I adopted Ruby on Rails very early. Not because it was trendy, but because it embodied a philosophy:
Ship early. Learn fast. Fix quickly.
At that time, it worked.
“Always Beta” was one of the coolest ideas of the Web 2.0 era. Fast iteration, real-world feedback, constant adjustment—it pushed the entire industry forward.
The underlying assumption was clear: change mattered more than stability.
Then AI became my primary collaborator
The real shift happened when AI stopped being a tool and started becoming a daily collaborator.
I noticed something unsettling.
I wasn’t spending most of my time writing code anymore. I was:
- Feeding context to AI
- Correcting its misunderstandings
- Re-explaining what I actually meant
And slowly, a deeply counter-intuitive realization emerged:
When communicating with AI, saying too little is itself a form of waste.
With insufficient input:
- Models hallucinate
- Answers become vague
- You enter endless correction loops
- Your thinking gets interrupted
This wasn’t a model problem. It was an input problem.
Extreme Input: a conclusion, not a provocation
This tension led me to a concept I now call Extreme Input.
It’s not about talking recklessly. It’s not about dumping raw thoughts into a model.
It does acknowledge that:
- Noise still exists
- Errors still matter
- Signal must still be extracted
But here’s the shift:
Humans should no longer be responsible for all the compression.
CyberWhisper isn’t about voice — it’s about responsibility
That’s why I built CyberWhisper.
It’s not “a better voice input tool.”
It’s a re-allocation of responsibility:
- Humans provide fast, continuous, unfiltered input
- The system understands context, removes noise, and restructures
- AI can finally reason reliably
You don’t need to think everything through before you speak. You need a system that can think with you while your thoughts are forming.
Closing
Every era redefines what “waste” really is.
In the age of AI, the biggest waste isn’t saying the wrong thing—
It’s failing to capture your real thinking at all.
CyberWhisper was born from that belief.
It’s not just a product. It’s a stance—shaped by years of how I think, build, and learn.