James Dishman

I built an autonomous AI system that manages a knowledge base of 3,397 active memories, 2,474 entities, and 10,349 active facts with full vector search across 2,075 indexed vault notes, routes tasks across multiple models by cost and capability, syncs reference materials from Google Drive, and posts reports to 9 Discord channels. Then the platform I built it on changed the rules, and I had to migrate the entire system under constraint in 48 hours. The real lesson was not about automation. It was about trust calibration, platform dependency, and what happens when you design a collaborator instead of a tool.

Multiple UX evaluation methods applied to three Ableton products, grounded in deep music production experience and a decade leading the Pittsburgh Ableton User Group. The suite revealed a consistent pattern: Ableton designs for insiders, and that works until someone shows up for the first time.

I ran a multi-method accessibility audit across music tech, news, social media, and academic sites. The work covered WCAG compliance, hands-on VoiceOver screen reader testing on GroundNews, an Instagram accessibility audit of a university account, contrast analysis, PDF remediation, and cognitive accessibility research. The biggest finding wasn't any single violation. It was that accessibility best practices for people and machine readability for AI are the same goal, and most teams are failing at both.

An in-progress iPad FM synthesizer that treats every available device sensor as a modulation source: motion, environment, camera, spatial, and touch. The more environmental variables feed the synthesis engine, the more unpredictable and unrepeatable each patch becomes. The design question: what happens when the instrument responds not just to your body, but to the full physical context you exist in?

A divination app that combines I Ching hexagram generation, Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, and AI synthesis into a single reading. The point is not prediction. It is studying what happens to human reflection and judgment when algorithmic output is framed as wisdom instead of information.

The Pittsburgh Ableton User Group needed a home that wasn't rented from a social media platform. I designed and built paug.net as a standalone community hub with events, blog, founder bios, and a CMS so non-technical co-founders can publish content. The site is live, DNS is configured, and PAUG finally has a URL it owns.

Thirty years of making electronic music. An MS in UX. An AI agent system running in production. Nobody has combined all three to solve music education. This is the concept.