Jon Tidd
Hi, I'm Jon

I build tools
for human
flourishing

I build AI tools to ignite curiosity and help people learn and live well. I'm hooked on exploring the intersection of technology, classical wisdom, and raising good humans.

Off the clock camping with the kiddos·synthwave & tundra rock concerts·a growing wall full of 90’s sci-fi animation cels

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Projects

What I'm building

Each project starts with a question worth answering.

Project #1
"Can twelve years of my Spotify history figure out who I am, and then tell me what I'm missing?"

Drop the Needle

Live · sound on
A turntable with orbiting album covers under the headline What would Jon listen to?

It read 12 years of plays and called me out: a retro-future escapist who wants songs that build over hooks, goes heavy, but warm, and listens album, not algorithm. Then it got cocky and picked five bands it's shocked I don't play.

A spinning turntable of my real top records · free 30-second clips, no login · 12 years, 14 genres · a podcasts side too.
Drop the needle
Project #2
"My boys are Pokémon-obsessed. What if their math practice was a Pokémon adventure they'd beg to go on?"

PokéMath

Family project · private
Trainer Mason's Gym Challenge sheet: 17 + 17, 21 + 21, 23 + 24, 27 + 27

Daily Pokémon missions for two trainers: crack a Who's That Pokémon? mystery, battle a Gym Challenge, color in your badge. The fun is the hook. Underneath, it's a coach that learns every week.

Aligned to the kindergarten & 2nd-grade curriculum · reads the weekly class newsletter and pulls that week's lessons into the challenges · photos of finished sheets show what they got right and wrong · then it throttles difficulty and question count up or down each week to accelerate learning.
Family project · private
Project #3
"What if bedtime stories could actually build character, not just entertain?"

Bedtime Virtues

Early Preview
Generosity

Character is built one story at a time, what Aristotle called hexis. This app pairs AI-generated stories rooted in the cardinal virtues with parent discussion guides to make each lesson stick.

16 classical virtues organized under Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance. 57+ curated classics spanning 2,600 years from Aesop to C.S. Lewis. A Virtue Compass radar chart tracks your child's character growth across every trait. AI stories generated via Claude, each mapped to specific virtues with guided discussion prompts.
Try it free

Early preview, free for friends & family while in development.
Project #4
"What if you could map an entire mind (every podcast, every YouTube video, every written word) and then talk to it?"

The Rudyard Library

An explorable 3D atlas of Rudyard Lynch's intellectual universe. Built from his complete corpus: every episode diarized, transcribed, and structured into a living knowledge graph you can navigate and interrogate.

3.6 million words across 483 episodes, diarized with Whisper, chunked into 8,168 semantic passages, and embedded in a vector database. 469 books and 53 thinkers extracted and cross-referenced. 5,213 claims identified, categorized, and mapped into a 3D galaxy built with Three.js. RoboRudyard: a RAG-powered AI that answers in his voice with source citations to exact episodes.
Explore the Library

Independent fan project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Rudyard Lynch or Whatifalthist.
Project #5
"Can I train a model to find an ancient civilization on Mars?"

Mars Search

0.16% of Mars swept
Context and close-up of an elongated, round-ended rim on an old crater floor at 30.13°N 23.87°E Candidate tiles scored by hand: four marked interesting, four marked natural The reference example: a flat-topped block with edges meeting at sharp angles

A computer-vision scanner that sweeps NASA orbital imagery for geometry that wind, water and impacts struggle to explain, then hands a short list to a human (and my kids) to judge. The odds are very low. They aren't zero, so I'm checking.

235,065 km² of Terra Sabaea swept at 6 m/pixel in 2.6 hours on a laptop: 192,299 cells scored for right angles, corners and parallel walls. Validated by planting weathered walls, grids and pyramids into real imagery and measuring where they rank. Streams HiRISE and CTX imagery on demand and stores measurements, not photos.
Read the write-up
Project #6
"Can a fantasy football novice automate his way to championship glory?"

Fantasy Engine

Live · In Season
Championship odds8.3%
🏈 Start Ferguson at TE. Add Juwan Johnson, drop Evans. Reply YES and I'll set your lineup.
ranked by ΔP(championship)

An autonomous GM that manages a full fantasy football team and texts its owner the one move to make. It's built for a total novice, so the software does the thinking and he just txts YES.

8 live data feeds fused weekly (Yahoo, nflverse, Vegas lines, Sleeper, ESPN, xFP). A 10,000-season Monte-Carlo simulation engine ranks every move by ΔP(championship), not points, modeling injuries, correlation & your league's exact scoring. It texts the single move and sets your Yahoo lineup on a reply, then runs itself 24/7 on a Mac mini.
Open the live dashboard
Project #7
"What if a family's whole history, one hundred thousand years of it, could live on one beautiful, readable website?"

The Tidd Family History

Live
A 1696 Tidd headstone in the Lexington burying ground First Parish in Lexington, found from a grandfather's polaroid Nineteenth-century Tidd ancestor portraits

A seven-chapter family history site tracing the Tidd line from the first humans out of Africa to my three kids. Deep-ancestry migration maps you step through, famous Tidds in their own words, three generations of real DNA, and a photo archive of a 2010 pilgrimage: 1696 gravestones, the Tidd House, and flip-through genealogy books, every source traced.

three.js ancestral starfield · D3 living world & U.S. maps · flip-book documents with typed transcriptions & a text-size slider for every age · a three-generation genome ledger · built to be read aloud at a reunion. A fast, no-build static site.
Explore the family history →
Project #8
"What does it actually take to shave 14 strokes off your game in a single summer?"

The Tiger Method

Live · In Season
The Tiger Method
SHAVE 14 STROKES
16-week on-course plan · bogey golf by Sept 1
Week 7 / 16 · Sand & Bunker Play

A 16-week, on-course practice plan engineered to turn a struggling weekend golfer into a consistent bogey shooter by September 1, built on the insight that your short game, not your swing, is where the strokes actually hide.

96 drills across 16 weeks, weighted toward putting & chipping (40% of all strokes). A live pace tracker scores you against the calendar (on pace vs. behind) and counts down the days to your goal. Progress saves locally and syncs across phone, tablet & laptop through a lightweight cloud store. Pure HTML/CSS/JS, no build, no login.
Open the plan
Project #9
"What if a startup's whole operating plan ran itself, notes, owners and follow-ups updating live after every call?"

Startup Battleplan

Private build
Startup Battleplan, the founders' 90-day operating plan, with names redacted

A custom project-management cockpit for running a startup end to end, purpose-built instead of bent out of a generic tool. Everyone works inside the same living plan, at the same time.

Synchronized notes with real-time collaborative editing: multiple people in one doc, live cursors, instant merge. Assign owners to every initiative and task so accountability is never ambiguous. Scheduled updates pull action items straight out of your project calls, so the plan reflects the latest conversation on its own. One source of truth for strategy, tasks & momentum.
Private build · in active use
Project #10
"What if you could screen thousands of real-world sites and have an engine tell you exactly which ones to pursue first?"

Site Screener

Stealth
Interactive map with color-coded, scored sites Site detail card with a 92/100 fit score, sub-score breakdown and recommended next action Candidate table ranked by fit score, best matches first

A geospatial screening engine for an early-stage venture, with a recommendation engine built in. It ingests public-records data, scores every candidate 0–100 against weighted criteria, and tells the team which sites to pursue first, ranked on an interactive map. (What it's screening for stays under wraps.)

Recommendation engine: eight weighted criteria roll up to a 0–100 fit score, hard disqualifiers auto-zero fatal flaws, and every site gets a verdict: pursue now, visit, watch, or skip. Interactive map with color-coded results · drill-down sub-score breakdowns · shared votes & notes for the founding team. A fast, no-dependency static app behind an access gate.
Stealth venture · live tool

Live screenshots. The organization and end-use are intentionally withheld.

Project #11
"At a 600-person family camp, how do you find the handful of families you'll genuinely click with?"

Tyler Place Connections

Seasonal
Your top-5 best-matched families The whole roster on one US map, colored by match strength All 74 families, searchable and sortable

A family-matching and search engine for guests at Tyler Place Family Resort. Tell it about your crew, and it surfaces your five best-matched families, then lets you explore the whole week on one map.

Match scoring across kids' ages, home states, interests & repeat-guest history · your top-5 connections computed instantly · all 74 families searchable & sortable · a full-roster connection map · year-over-year changes. A static app, password-gated for the community.
Built for the 2026 season · invite only

An independent hobby project. Not affiliated with Tyler Place Family Resort.

About

The builder

The Tidd family

I'm an AI developer and father exploring what happens when you point powerful new tools at problems that actually matter.

My work lives at the intersection of agentic AI and classical wisdom — building things that help families raise children of character in an age of algorithmic distraction.

I write prompts, read old books, and think about what it means to live well.

Connect

Let's talk

I'm always interested in meaningful work and good conversations.

GitHub
LinkedIn
Thanks! I'll get back to you soon.
Writing

Notes from the field

April 2026 I Built My Portfolio in One Sitting With Claude. Here's What I Learned.