I am Thai, but I grew up in Brussels speaking French and Dutch before I could speak Thai.

Brussels

Both of my parents are Thai, but I was born and raised in Brussels, and I spoke French and Dutch long before I could manage a word of Thai. Thai outside, Belgian inside: a banana (yellow outside, white inside; East Asian in face, Western in upbringing) , as the joke goes, and I have always been happy to tell it on myself. Food is the easiest way to explain my family history. My father worked in a Brussels antique shop owned by a Belgian named Karel Steppe; Karel later married my aunt, the Thai chef Nooror Somany, and together they founded Blue Elephant.Yes, that Blue Elephant. The one with restaurants and cookbooks. My own parents settled in Brussels and opened a restaurant of their own. So I grew up European, in a family that fed people for a living, with Thai heritage at home, but without enough Thai to hold a proper conversation.

Then, in 2020, my uncle asked whether I would come to Thailand to help run the manufacturing and export side of the business. I said yes almost before he had finished the question. I wanted to live in Thailand and understand the Thai part of my family through everyday life, not only from Brussels.

150 people, paper everywhere

What I met first was how much I did not know. I arrived as Vice Managing Director of a company of 150 people, and I could not speak to most of them. The work ran on paper, perhaps ninety percent of it, and on something harder for a Brussels boy to read: the quiet grammar of a Thai workplace. In that office, harmony and seniority shaped the conversation, and a direct “no” could be less polite than a careful pause. The care beneath it all has a name, kreng jai (เกรงใจ): a deep reluctance to impose on or discomfort another, especially a senior; it keeps things harmonious, and unspoken , and I learned it in practice rather than from a definition: sometimes the pause mattered more than the answer. People often assumed I knew how Thailand worked because I looked Thai. I was still learning the language, the office habits, and the parts nobody writes down.

For a long time I moved between production questions, export paperwork, and conversations I could only half follow, and my inbox was never, ever empty. I could see the potential everywhere and could not get at it, because I could not arrive from Brussels and replace long-standing habits overnight; too much of the company ran on trust, seniority, and memory. So I changed it the only way it could be changed: slowly, one careful step at a time, moving the company towards digitisation and hiring a younger generation who were readier to shake things up. There were weeks when a change half-stuck and I came back on Monday to the old process. The work is still not finished. But I love a problem, and this was the largest one anyone had ever handed me.

The weekend diet tracker

ChatGPT was the first tool that made my day feel materially different. For the first time since I had arrived, my inbox reached zero, and I still remember the faintly absurd relief of it. Soon after, Shortwave put the model directly inside my mail, so I stopped copy-pasting my life back and forth between two windows; I use it to this day. When I checked what Shortwave was using under the hood, I saw Claude and tried it directly. One weekend I picked a small problem I understood, my own diet tracking, and built a first version. By the end of that weekend, the diet tracker worked well enough for me to use it, and that was the moment I stopped treating AI as only an inbox shortcut.

The build

The next thing I built was not a toy. It was an email agent that read what arrived and decided what actually mattered, so I was left with only the messages that needed my judgement. After years of inbox overflow, I had a filter I trusted. Then, naturally, I got cocky. I tried five separate times to build an AI-native e-commerce site, and five times I failed.

After the fifth failed attempt, I stopped blaming the tools and looked at how I was building. The one-shot demos you see online, the “I built a whole app in a single prompt” performances, are a fantasy. I still had to learn to write requirements, think through data, handle edge cases, test changes, and read error messages without panicking, and my own naivety was exactly why I failed. So I went back to those basics, learned to write the spec before chasing the vibe, and began writing the whole journey down, in public, here.

The rest of me

A few non-work details, because they probably explain me as much as the job does. I am an iconoclast, and an unrepentantly ambitious one. I think out loud, I love a good debate, and I try to be direct without making the other person feel attacked. People take me for a hyper-extrovert, though the truth is I am only that when I feel like it. Away from a keyboard you will find me tending my plants, at a board-game table, doing calisthenics, learning another language, wandering through some culture I have not met yet, out too late in a club, or arguing about where to eat, which in my family is a serious matter.A spice family. The stakes of dinner are high.

June 2026

I started this site in June 2026 because I needed a place to write the work down. It was my first real step out of the family business and into AI. AI had become my weekend habit, the work I chose after the family-business workweek ended. Now I want to help people and companies choose one AI use case that is worth building, write the spec, ship a working tool, and measure whether it saves time. And more than any single project, I am excited about the people I will meet by doing it.