叻

Lekjai

叻仔 (lek jai) is Cantonese for “clever kid”. It’s what you say when someone figures something out.

Lekjai is a one-person studio. I’m Jiawen Lai, a software engineer in Vancouver, and I build tools that help one person think clearly, practise hard and keep going. The first one runs my own days.

Prime building now

A personal operating system I built with Claude Code.

It holds everything in motion in my life, from interview rounds to chores, the gym and money, and turns it into one plan for the day. It preps me before each interview, keeps the lessons from my mistakes and checks whether I’m learning them. Every night it builds one improvement to itself, with a prediction it has to meet or the change gets reverted.

Prime's Today page: a week of interview calls across the top, the day's work grouped by kind of thinking, and what shipped today.
Today, in Private mode: companies become letters, people become stand-ins, and dates and times are blurred.

Pieces of Prime

Some of its parts, newest first.

Walkout

A boxer’s ring entrance before an interview. My name against the round and the tale of the tape in my own numbers, then the lights go down and an announcer reads my record before the bell. Every number is real.

A fight poster: The Candidate versus The Technical Interview, with a tale of the tape: 13 rounds sat, 1.7 blue whales lifted.

The door

When I come back to the laptop after 45 minutes away, it opens full screen on the day’s hardest task instead of whatever I left open. Each deep session I finish becomes a star in this sky.

A constellation of finished deep sessions, the newest star in gold, titled Evaluate the Bracket Pairs.

Glow

The system’s week, replayed. Every file is a light that flares when something writes to it. The orbs below are the background jobs, red when one failed.

Grids of glowing squares, one per file, grouped by folder, with a row of orbs for background jobs.