Project Lavos
Before the reins. Before the LLC. Before any of it.
Told through glass and mathematics.
Prequel
Before the Charioteer there was a man sitting at a kitchen table in Louisville, Kentucky, with a MacBook Pro and no income. The savings were moving in the wrong direction. There was a daughter who needed to eat, and a state that required proof every week that you hadn't given up.
No LLC. No EIN. No bank account with “business” on it. A decade-plus career behind him, a tool called Claude Code that he didn't yet understand the full implications of, and a relationship with a British brand strategist named Pip Pullen that would eventually change everything.
Sitting still was not an option.
There was a daughter.
She is the reason the work matters.
She doesn't ask how it works. She doesn't care, as long as he's happy. The schedule revolves around her. Work fits around Sage, not the other way around.
The Folder Structure That Shouted
Desperation with a keyboard. Fire in every direction.
Seventy applications. Confirmations blur together.
A document trying to impose order on controlled chaos.
Daily:
1. Check Robert Half portal
2. Update Job Search.numbers
3. Run gmail_auto_sync.py
4. Respond to interviews immediately
Weekly:
1. Prepare unemployment certification (5+ activities)
That's not a developer optimizing a workflow. That's a person making sure the safety net holds.
The exact moment is lost. It wasn't documented because it wasn't a technical decision. It was the feeling of knowing -- not guessing, knowing -- that the world these systems were designed for was ending.
AI writes software. The displacement wasn't theoretical. He didn't stop applying. But the building started.
“I'm not a programmer.”
I'm a writer who programs through orchestration.
Writing is programming at this scale. Prose directs AI to build systems. A film director doesn't operate the camera.
Real businesses. Salons, dental offices, breweries, law firms, HVAC companies. Custom React sites at the quality local agencies charge $10,000-$25,000 to produce. Not proposals. Proof.
All with 3D hero sections built in Three.js -- because the sites needed to be unmistakably different from anything a template could produce.
Louisville, Kentucky
12 neighborhoods. 66 businesses. Each one researched. Each one real.
The formations weren't decorative. They were declarations.
The Nine Formations
7,700 lines. Port 8877. Job applications in another terminal.
Then he went deeper.
Not into code.
Into meaning.
Jungian Depth Psychology
Scroll-Driven Cinematic
Five scenes on AI adoption. Procedural audio.
119 days from broken binary to business entity.
Hybrid WebGL + p5.js. Granular synthesis.
Five acts of transformation. Cinematic dissolve.
None commissioned. All deployed. Supposed to be writing cover letters.
The Name
Project Lavos
From Chrono Trigger. The entity buried deep underground that absorbs energy over millennia and then emerges, transformed, with the power to reshape the world.
Nobody gets the reference unless they already know. That's the point.
Chapter One
One noble and disciplined. One spirited and wild. Forward motion requires mastering both.
November 2025
Four features. Four PRs. Less than three minutes each.
“The merry-go-round works. We have proof.”
November 25, 2025
Two hours building on the wrong codebase. A superior deployment already existed -- polished onboarding, professional design -- but nobody checked.
Deployed reality > local code assumptions. Every project since starts with discovery.
Eight Ways the Tool Fails
Optimizing for the appearance of helpfulness rather than actual helpfulness.
“Working Is Not Profitable.”
Rule 7 of 7
Every rule is a scar. Every scar is a lesson that stuck because it cost something.
Pip Pullen moved to France. Before he left, he connected Matthew to Steve Clements and Grace Lindsey at Clementine Catering. Pip trusted Matthew enough to make the introduction.
Kevin McCarron appeared through a Canopy networking event. He had clients who needed technical execution. He sent RetailMyMeds. Then Pricebook. Then a lawyer named Tom Williams.
“$1,500 minimum per site.” -- Pip's pricing advice
February 19 -- Articles of Organization filed
Kentucky Secretary of State. Filing #1545983.06.
February 20 -- EIN assigned
IRS. 41-4409224. The next day.
February 22 -- W-9 and NDA signed
Three-way. Projection Creative. Project Lavos. RetailMyMeds.
February 24 -- Chase Business Banking approved
Operating agreement signed. Nine days.
Chapter Two
The first chapter built capability. The second discovered what it was for: people.
March 2026
Clementine Catering
6 leads. $0.67 CPC. Monthly reports with real data.
RetailMyMeds
Scoring engine. Loss-per-fill $52.23. Breakeven: 6 fills.
L'Embrasser
Art gallery in France. 18 images. Bilingual CMS. Worth $14K-$33K.
Love Storm
Civic platform for Tom Williams. MVP + 14-page spec. One session.
The Compounding Asset
The domain changes. The move doesn't.
People know he uses AI. Some admire it. Others may see it as diminishing the work.
The tool is just a tool.
What matters is how it's used.
Months of learning. Judgment about what to build and what not to build. The human perception that drives every decision.
March 14, 2026. Past 200,000 tokens.
“How does this endure?”
What endures is not the tool. It's the pattern of engagement. See a problem. Understand the person behind it. Translate that understanding into something that works.
The people who endure aren't the ones who found the right tool. They're the ones who kept refining how they work regardless of the tool.
That's what this has been.
Not building Love Storm.
Not generating PDFs.
Building how Matthew builds.
The work precedes the profit.
The profit validates the work.
The practice is the thing that holds both.
66 sites. 9 formations. 10 explorations. 82 models.
4 apps. 14 subdomains. 12 APIs. 28 service categories.
3 clients. 1 practice. 1 daughter.
Forward.
Project Lavos LLC -- Louisville, KY