Projects — Nicolai Johannesen

Shipped v4.35.0 · 19 July 2026

Trade Time

A small site that fixes the timezone friction I kept hitting when I traded from Asia. One screen, your markets, your timezone — earnings calls labelled where you actually are, hours till the next open computed for every exchange on the same dashboard. Now with a crawlable page for every exchange — "is the NYSE open right now?" — answerable straight from a search, plus a free API and an MCP server for anyone who wants the data in code or an agent.

Open beta. Currently donation-supported; first paid tier coming next. Live at tradeti.me.

Writing reader v2.4.6 · Part I live

Let Them Struggle

A parenting book on the architecture that lets children learn at the edge of their capability — without protecting them so much they never reach it. Mechanism-first: an upward spiral of struggle, persistence, and recovery that compounds into capability, earned confidence, and peace.

Part I — three chapters — is written and readable now, in a bilingual reader with English and Danish side by side. Read the free sample →

Experiment v0.1 · live

Battle of Ideas

For a contested claim — remote work, nuclear power, free will — the strongest case each side can make, side by side. One AI steelmans each side, a second red-teams it, a third checks the sources; every argument carries its tier, confidence, counters, and receipts.

An experiment, and it says so — every argument is AI-generated and judged on merit, not authorship. Live at battle-of-ideas.com.

Shipped open source · MIT

Second Brain Starter Kit

Everything you need to build your own AI-maintained second brain — a compounding knowledge base in plain markdown that Claude Code reads from and writes to. The system behind everything else on this site, de-personalized so you can put your life in it.

My first open-source release. You own the artifact: plain files, versioned with git, no platform in the way. How it works →

Building the operating layer

NJ Solo Co

A one-person AI company experiment. The bet: with current AI tooling, an individual can run the engineering, design, marketing, and operations of what used to require a team.

Trade Time is the first ship — the training ground where the working layer gets built and tested: per-project mission statements, working operating manuals, a marketing process, decision logs, a wiki that's slowly become the way I think. That working layer is the real product; the company is what's left when it compounds across projects.

Shipped v1.2.1 · live

Solar System Explorer

A 3D interactive map of the solar system as it actually is — eight planets in their orbits, five recognised dwarf planets, the major moons of each gas giant, named asteroids by spectral type, the next Mars transfer window counted in days.

Built with Three.js. Live at /solar-system/.

Writing drafting chapters

Feedback Loops — the book

A popular-nonfiction treatment of feedback loops as the universal pattern beneath improvement. Falcon 9 landing burns and the US Constitution's multi-frequency error correction belong to the same family. So do PDCA, OODA, Kolb, and the spiral. So does evolution.

Manuscript drafted — 13 chapters, about 25,000 words — revising now.

In-house tool v0.13.0 · local-only

Book Editor

The authoring cockpit I write the books in. It keeps each book's standard — its Northstar, brief, verified evidence, and target length — on screen beside the prose, so every edit is made in full view of the bar it has to clear, not from memory.

Built for one author, used daily; the produce-side companion to the reader. Local-only by design — never deployed. How it works →

Drafting v0.2 · live on this site

Enlightenment Toolkit

Eleven thinking moves that, used together with an LLM, make rigorous reasoning as cheap as a chatbot question. The convergent core of every tradition that had to think reliably — Greek dialectic, scientific method, Popper's falsification, Tetlock's calibration, Stoic practice, surgical checklists — packaged as a document you paste into your LLM.

Published here as the canonical version; still closing a few artifact gaps before it's fully done. Read it →

Live 159 concept articles · live

Essential Concepts

A cross-linked library of foundational ideas across science, philosophy, and psychology — the earlier project this wiki and the toolkit both grew out of. Each concept article explains one mental model in a single read: a real story, a precise definition, and where it breaks.

A handful of nexus articles go further — weaving several concepts into how a real phenomenon actually works (how luck really works; why improvement feels like getting worse). Live at concepts.battle-of-ideas.com.