Building Jiva in the open

Jiva is a fully-local second brain for the Mac, built by one product manager who can't write the code — every line written with an AI. This is the running log of that attempt: the origin, the hard on-device audio problems, the things that broke, and the honest question of how far this goes.

14 September 2026 · 7 min read

The Granola-and-Claude moment that started Jiva

I used a meeting recorder and an AI side by side for months before I noticed what they could do together. Then I hit the same wall three times, and the wall turned out to be the product.

More on the way — the first thing that broke, why attribution is really an audio problem, and the honest market read.