Jan 1, 2026

Prometheus

The tale of Prometheus for me began back in 2007.

It was the year I went to study computer science in 2007 at the University of Birmingham the same year that the iPhone came out and changed our world.

I got kind of obsessed with Apple like many others.

I spent a chunk of my savings, a significant chunk on a desktop iMac. I followed everything they did, relatively religiously, even prior to this like many others. I was obsessed with the iPod, particularly my iPod Mini. I was never early to Apple products, I never had the money for that. But when I did get them, they felt like magic.

A few years in my final year of university, I decided I wanted to build an app. The application would form my end of year project, my final year project, and would contribute to my overall grade. To do this after years of looking at Java, I decided in my final year to learn Objective C from scratch. The aim of the app was to share links seamlessly between an iPhone and an iMac with a single swipe, bearing in mind that this was not a native feature then, like we have AirDrop and Seamless Sharing now. While the app didn’t quite work in my dissertation presentation, and finding the issue immediately when I got home in a slightly less sleep-defrived state, I got it all working.

That gave me my first taste of building something that was mine, truly mine, that felt more substantial somehow than previous smaller projects over the years.

I then went to join a start-up when I graduated, and I built out other applications, but I held onto having something of my own. I was busy building other people’s dreams, dreams that I was truly passionate about, but that yearning to create something that was mine from inception to reality didn’t go away. I built a number of different things through my career, both as a software engineer and as a product manager, overseeing what I started to oversee rather than write code. It nagged at me for a while, always talking to developers, but never being the one that was writing the code to bring these things to life. Don’t get me wrong, I love my transition into product management, but it’s one of those things I think many people have. When you’ve learnt to code and you transition away, there’s always an urge to come back, see if the skills are still there, to scratch their age.

So flash forward to the pandemic in 2020, and a shower thought occurred to me about having an app that could help people optimise their human experience, to aid in achieving the goals and the life that they wanted. I think at the time, being locked up, cooped up, being very unsure and uncertain in the future, having recently got caught into personal development, reading different approaches, having set goals, achieved some, missed many. I’m wanting to work out more and more consciously what kind of life did I want, how was I going to achieve that, how was I going to arrive at the destination that I wanted, rather than the ones that sometimes life and other people direct us towards.

This is when the idea for Prometheus came about.

Now, you’ll know the story of Prometheus, the Titan that gave knowledge and fire to humanity, and his reward was to be chained to a rock and have his liver torn out daily by a vulture. I think there are parables with this and life. We need knowledge. Through knowledge, we have become the most powerful and capable species on this planet. But even with all the knowledge, we still struggle. Even with so much knowledge, we still struggle. So many struggle. There have also been moments in certainly my life where each day has felt like a struggle, a metaphorical vulture tearing my liver out, only for it to grow back and for it to occur again and again and again. We will go through the daily struggles, some severe, for others less so. But our pain is relative to our personal experience. However, I do believe that daily exertion, daily discomfort is something that allows us to harness knowledge and reach our true potential.

So in 2020, a little bit like learning Objective C, back in the late noughties, I decided to start a new and learn React in order to be able to use React Native to build my app. In 2021, I started making my first commits and build for my first version of Prometheus. It really did look like a task and habit tracking software, which many, many people which many, many software developers seem to start with or focus on, likely because everyone has the problem of needing to manage tasks. The problem is so ubiquitous. My point was about a slightly dressier version using a Greek god’s name and looking to align those tasks and habits to allowing a person to link them to, to finding a vision, the ability to reflect, monitor those reflections over time. So maybe slightly more than a glorified to-do app. But the seed of the idea was there. I was building it and it was a glimmer of hope in an otherwise relatively scary time. But I quickly, but I eventually burnt out. I was looking at a screen for long hours during my day job, trying to adapt to COVID and new and accelerated ways of working remotely. I was then spending hours at night and weekends further looking at screens, building this thing, learning the language to a greater depth. And then spending more time and relaxation, watching more screens, more TV, more shows. Hey, don’t judge. There were loads of options for things to do back then. So during 2021, my acceleration waned and a very busy and difficult period of life started for me for a number of years. More time than I would care. More time than I ever thought possible to deal with. A lot of pain.

Flash forward again to the start of 2025. I saw an opportunity to pick this stream back up with my experimentation with LLMs picking up during 2024, seeing how they could be used to rapidly prototype and build ideas in a conversational way with your computer. I then thought, hmm, let’s see how we might use this to build, to pick up the threads of Prometheus again. So again, it became my outlet, my outlet for learning, the creativity, my outlet for something that was truly mine. And with the LLMs, I was able to actually sustain making iterations on this project in weekends, in evenings and at weekends. In a handful of hours a week, I could make more progress than I would have been able to make in weeks or months previously. So it became a way to learn more about these tools, how to get them to work well, how to iterate what worked well, what didn’t, where they went wrong, where they broke things, how to really become a partner to this world’s changing technology.

And so towards the end of 2025, just through a handful of hours here or there during the course of the year, I now have something that I’m using daily, but it’s something that’s gone beyond the scope of the original brief. It’s now something that’s gone beyond the original vision. It’s not just about using AI to build from atheist, but infusing AI within, using AI to become a coach in your pocket, to really make this an app that should be the first thing and the last thing someone looks at, to become an app where you’re able to work with Prometheus to define your vision, the identity you want to assume, the ambitious goals you want to achieve, the plans, tasks and habits you need to realise them, the reflections daily, weekly and monthly to ensure that you’re on track. And to most importantly, have someone that is constantly fighting for you and is on your side. This is the real Prometheus and I’m so excited to share more with you. This year, this has been 18 years in the making. I’m looking forward to seeing how this can help people realise their dreams just as I am realising mine by bringing this to the world.