Diego De Nicola Creative Technology Visual Design Photography Product & AI Builds
I'm a Melbourne-based creative technologist. I spent twenty-plus years learning to see (photography), structure (design) and solve (product).
Now I build with AI as a working material — designing assistant workspaces, agent workflows and bespoke production tools that remove friction and noise from creative work.
Less admin, fewer tabs, more of the actual craft.
Assistant workspaces, agent teams and AI-augmented workflows — designed around how a studio actually works, not around the tool. Model-agnostic by design: Claude, GPT, or local models running entirely in-house.
Purpose-built apps for real operational problems — inventory, costing, project management, content pipelines. Built fast with AI-assisted development, shaped by twenty years of design judgement so they're tools people want to use.
The foundation everything sits on. Twenty-five years of observation, visual systems and interface design. This is why the tools I build don't look or feel like engineering demos — they're designed. Purpose-built apps for real operational problems — inventory, costing, project management, content pipelines. Built fast with AI-assisted development, shaped by twenty years of design judgement so they're tools people want to use.
AI Suite
What started as a single local-first assistant experiment has evolved into a family of independent sibling apps — chat and personas, memory, coding, and creative surfaces — each with its own model pool, running entirely on local hardware. Bruce is the proving ground: private, offline, no subscriptions, no data leaving the room. It's where I learn what intelligent tools should feel like before building them for anyone else.
AI / Vision
Bruce's visual memory. A local vision-model app that ingests, reads and remembers images — turning a photographic archive into something you can converse with. Built on open vision models, running offline. The most personal build in the suite, and the one pointing most clearly at where creative tooling is going.
Operations
A project management app built end-to-end with AI systems — planned in Bruce, developed in Codex, iterated through Cowork, designed by me. It works. Functionally, today. MiManager is the working proof of the offer: one person, orchestrating AI systems, shipping a real internal tool that a team can run on
Archive
A new venture: learning generative image pipelines from the model level up — checkpoints, upscaling, regeneration — and building an app around it. Early, deliberate, and documented as it develops. Twenty-five years of photography meets the next tool for making pictures.
Commerce
Bespoke operational tools for a fashion label — garment cost calculators, inventory systems, product storytelling. Small, sharp tools solving real studio problems, built from Figma design systems to working software.
Archive
Reviewing and restructuring a long-term body of street, urban and observational photography — presenting the work with the same care and seriousness as the design and product work.
AI Suite
What started as a single local-first assistant experiment has evolved into a family of independent sibling apps — chat and personas, memory, coding, and creative surfaces — each with its own model pool, running entirely on local hardware. Bruce is the proving ground: private, offline, no subscriptions, no data leaving the room. It's where I learn what intelligent tools should feel like before building them for anyone else.
2026—>AI / Vision
Bruce's visual memory. A local vision-model app that ingests, reads and remembers images — turning a photographic archive into something you can converse with. Built on open vision models, running offline. The most personal build in the suite, and the one pointing most clearly at where creative tooling is going.
2026—>Operations
A project management app built end-to-end with AI systems — planned in Bruce, developed in Codex, iterated through Cowork, designed by me. It works. Functionally, today. MiManager is the working proof of the offer: one person, orchestrating AI systems, shipping a real internal tool that a team can run on
2026—>Archive
A local-first AI assistant experiment built around personality, usefulness and creative workflow — a quiet, capable workspace companion rather than another noisy productivity product.
2026—>Commerce
Bespoke operational tools for a fashion label — garment cost calculators, inventory systems, product storytelling. Small, sharp tools solving real studio problems, built from Figma design systems to working software.
2026—>Photography taught me to observe. Design taught me to structure. Product taught me to solve. AI didn't change what I make — it removed everything standing between the idea and the thing.
