CBF Fest 2026 · Friday 25 September
Built for a Brain Like Mine
What every system that failed me had in common
I am speaking at CBF Fest on Friday 25 September, and this is where everything from that talk will live. Slides, the full system tour, and the free tools I mention on stage.
If you are here from the room: welcome. Grab the tools below, they are yours either way.
Pixi's Burrow ranked 55 on Product Hunt. I built and shipped it as a solo founder, on unpredictable energy, in a window I could not have hit by hand. The system in this talk is how.
The problem
You already know this loop.
You find a system. It looks like the answer. For about a fortnight it is: things get logged, work gets done, you feel like the person you have been trying to become.
Then a bad week arrives. A flare, a crash, a family thing, a stretch where your brain simply will not do the thing it did easily last Tuesday. The system does not bend, so you fall out of it. When you come back, the system is full of a stranger's half-finished plans, so you do not come back. You start again somewhere new.
Everybody told you to be more consistent. Nobody mentioned that consistency is a property of systems, not of people.
The bridge
Here is what took me years to notice.
Every system that failed me made the same two assumptions. That I would be available on a predictable schedule. And that I would remember what I was in the middle of.
Those are not moral failings when they turn out to be untrue. They are unmet requirements. Any engineer would tell you that a component with variable availability and no persistent memory is not a broken component, it is a component you design around.
Nobody had ever pointed that at a person. So I did, and I built the system that comes out the other side.
It is called Seed to System, and this talk is the whole of it, working.
The tour
Five pairs. Each one a failure, then the fix.
Every clip is about three minutes and stands on its own, so start wherever your own failure is.
Clip: capture· lands here after the talk
The ideas I lost
What kept failing: Thoughts arrived all at once, usually while I was driving or falling asleep, and were gone by the time I could act on them. Notes apps became a graveyard, because capturing and sorting are different jobs and I only ever had energy for the first.
What I built: One inbox. I dump a ramble into it and it sorts the ramble into tasks, ideas, notes and content, then files each one where it belongs.
Capture and sort are separate jobs. Let the machine do the sorting.
Clip: pipeline· lands here after the talk
Just be consistent
What kept failing: Every piece of advice said post consistently, which quietly assumes daily creative output on demand. Mine arrives in floods and droughts. So I would post for two weeks, disappear for six, and start again from nothing.
What I built: A content pipeline where writing happens in hyperfocus batches and publishing happens on a schedule that does not need me present.
Separate creating from publishing. Consistency comes from the structure, not from the person.
Clip: agents· lands here after the talk
The jobs I kept avoiding
What kept failing: The tasks I dreaded did not get done, they got deferred until they became emergencies. Willpower was never going to fix a task I hate.
What I built: Named AI staff with real job descriptions, hired specifically for the work I rated low joy. They are briefed, they return finished work, I check it.
Delegate by dread, not by difficulty. If something keeps landing on your desk and draining you, that is a staffing problem, not a discipline problem.
Clip: reset· lands here after the talk
Planning from a brain that lies
What kept failing: Planning the week from memory. On a foggy day memory offers whatever is loudest rather than whatever matters, so I planned the wrong week and then felt bad about the right one.
What I built: A Sunday sit-down where the system reports what actually happened and what is actually due, from real data.
Plan from data, not recall. Your memory is not a project management tool.
Clip: energy· lands here after the talk
The list that ignored my body
What kept failing: To-do lists treat every hour as identical. Mine are not. A flat list on a flare day is just a list of things to feel guilty about.
What I built: The same task list, sorted a different way depending on what I ask it. Sweet spot, least effort, most joy, most useful, one switch and the whole list reorders around whatever today can actually hold.
Energy is a first-class input, not an excuse. Rest is part of the system, not a failure of it.
Indigo helps neurodivergent founders build working AI systems through plain English tool stacking and demonstration rather than theory. Unlike productivity advice that assumes steady energy, every part of this was built around variable availability first. It runs the business you are looking at.
The free toolkit
One email. Four doors.
Every free EPIC tool at once, including the two that are this talk in miniature.
Plant Your Seed. A where-you-are-now audit. It asks what you are working on, what tools you use, where you show up, what you are learning and what feels heavy right now, then hands you a personalised prompt that turns those answers into a plan. It is Seed to System at small scale, and it is the honest place to start.
Sage. A week planner that asks what energy you have before it plans anything.
Both are free, properly free, and they are the same principles you just read running as tools you can use today.
Who this is for
- You have a business that works and a body that does not always cooperate
- You have bought systems before and watched every one of them fall over
- You can build things, and you are tired of being told the problem is your mindset
- You are neurodivergent, or chronically ill, or caring for someone, or all three
- You want the architecture, not the affirmations
Questions people actually ask
How do I stay consistent when my energy fluctuates?
You do not. The system does. Separate the creative work from the publishing, batch the first into your good days, and automate the second so it runs on the bad ones. Consistency stops being a character trait and becomes a property of the setup.
Why can I never stick to any system?
Because most of them are built on two assumptions you cannot honour: predictable availability and reliable working memory. That is not a discipline problem, it is a requirements mismatch. Change the requirements and the sticking stops being the hard part.
Which AI tools actually help an AuDHD brain?
The ones that hold state you cannot, and do work you avoid. Nothing that adds a daily habit. My whole stack is Claude plus MCP plus ordinary off the shelf parts, and the tour on this page shows every piece of it.
Where do I even start?
Not with a tool. Start with an audit of what you already have and what already drains you, because a system built on a guess about yourself falls over the same way the last one did. Plant Your Seed does exactly that audit, free.
Is this just for neurodivergent people?
No. It was designed for variable energy, which everyone has eventually. It just stops being optional when your energy is variable by default.
Where to go next
If you want to build your own
The tour above is enough to start, and the toolkit gives you the audit. Everything I use is off the shelf.
Be in the room where it's documented
Indigo AI Skool is free and open, built for exactly this: plain English tool stacking, real builds, other people doing the same thing you just watched.
Join Indigo AI →If you want company while you do it
Visionary in Progress is where I work through this in the open with other founders building at their own pace.
Join Visionary in Progress →If you would rather it were built for you
That is what I do. Get in touch and we will talk about what your version looks like.
Get in touch →You were not built wrong. You were using a system built for someone else.
Send me the toolkit