I learn things by building them.
I'm Zachary Lewis, a builder in Detroit. Six companies run on what I've made.
I built Take Detroit, a video production business and city guide, and grew an audience of more than 100,000 followers and 25 million views across Facebook and Instagram. Behind the scenes, I was also building the websites, tools, and automations my clients used to run their businesses. The city guide never stopped. It's the Detroit Small Business Map now, and it's the oldest thing I still run.
In 2024, I turned that experience toward AI systems — not just calling models, but building the harnesses around them that allow them to actually do work.
I got obsessed. For two years I built constantly, because building was the only way to find out what was actually true. An agent platform. A trading workspace. A laundry marketplace. The city guide rebuilt as a map that fills in its own gaps. A support platform for families of people who are incarcerated. Free tools I gave away. Each one taught me something the last one couldn't, and most of what I learned was about the parts nobody demos.
The work has changed since then. I'm not building to learn anymore. I'm operating. Six companies run day to day on the agent platform I built, under spending ceilings and permission scopes I set, and my job is to keep them running and prove they work. That's a different discipline than shipping, and it's the one I'm documenting now.
The models are increasingly accessible. The difficult part is everything around them: knowing what a system will cost before it runs, keeping one customer's data separate from another's, connecting models to real tools and workflows, handling failures, and being able to prove afterward whether the system actually worked.
That's the part I build.
Not a deck. Not a prototype that falls apart when you click the wrong thing.
Software you can open in a browser and watch do the job.
If that sounds like what you need, let's build something. If you'd rather just see how I think, the long-form write-ups go deep on what each system does and what was hard about it — and the free tools are yours, no signup.