How not knowing became a method, and how that method became structure

Hi, I’m David.

I’ve always looked at things structurally and analytically. That’s just who I am.

I never had a technical education, but I could still see where tools in the workplace were falling short. Sometimes I could simplify things, automate parts of the work in Excel, and make processes clearer.

Then AI came along, and I started experimenting with it.

At first, it felt like the solution. But very quickly I ran into two limits at once: the limits of my own technical knowledge, and the ambiguity of AI itself. So even that was not enough.

That was the moment something clicked.

If I couldn’t solve that by becoming technical overnight, then I had to take control somewhere else: in the structure of how AI worked.

So I started working on that structure directly.

That eventually led to Quynah, a Google Workspace security platform I built without knowing how to code. It grew into roughly 400,000 lines of vanilla code in about four and a half months.

At the time, I didn’t even know frameworks existed. So everything was built from scratch.

Looking back, that constraint forced me to be extremely explicit about structure and decisions, because I had nothing abstracting things for me.

While building it, I also realized I needed a deterministic way to make analysis reliable. That led me to create a language for it.

But the deeper discovery was this: the method I used to build all of this could itself be structured, repeated, and eventually automated.

That became XOX.

APE is one proof that it works.

If you're curious, you can find more about Quynah at quynah.com.