nickcarter.ai — Design Spec

Created: 2026-03-27 Status: Approved Goal: A professional hiring interface that demonstrates how Nick works with AI — through artifacts, not assertions.

Problem

Nick has 18 years of engineering leadership, hands-on AI building skills, and artifacts that demonstrate both. None of this is visible to hiring managers. His resume compresses it into bullet points. LinkedIn compresses it further. The market pays $150K-$400K for the seven AI skills (Nate Jones framework), and Nick has 5+ at depth — but nobody can see that from a two-page PDF.

Solution

A standalone site at nickcarter.ai that presents Nick's professional identity through artifacts and expanded context, not resume claims. The site itself is an artifact — its design quality demonstrates what Nick brings to products.

Audience

Two visitors:

Cold: Found through Nate's Network, Google, or a referral. Knows nothing. Needs orientation in 5 seconds.
Warm: Recruiter or hiring manager who received the link. Has a rough idea, wants to go deeper.

The site works for both: quick orientation above the fold, depth below.

Core Message

"This is what your teams could be doing." Nick doesn't just use AI. He builds AI systems that produce real output — functional and artistic. He can lead the org AND show the teams how to do it.

Technical Architecture

Framework: Next.js 15 (static export for MVP via output: 'export')
Future migration: When AI chat and fit assessment features are added, migrate from static export to @cloudflare/next-on-pages for server-side rendering and API routes. This is a configuration change, not a rewrite — but it IS a migration. Document it here so it's not a surprise.
Styling: Tailwind CSS 4
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages
Domain: nickcarter.ai
Repo: New standalone repo (nickcarter-web or similar)
Design quality: High. Use frontend-design skill. The site must look distinctive, not generic AI-aesthetic. A hiring manager should think "this is what he'd bring to our products."

Pages

Landing Page (`/`)

Hero (above the fold)

Name: Nick Carter
Title/positioning: "Engineering leader who builds AI systems — and teaches teams to build them too"
Three engagement mode cards:

1. See What I Build — scrolls to artifact portfolio below 2. Ask AI About Me — placeholder, "Coming soon" 3. Check Fit — placeholder, "Coming soon"

Professional Summary

Three paragraphs, human voice, not resume-speak:

1. Who I am now. 18 years in engineering leadership. Regulated medical devices (BD, Dexcom). Director-level, managing managers. But hands-on with AI — building real systems, not advising from slides.

2. What I'm looking for. I'd rather be an IC at a company that adopts AI than a leader at one that doesn't. Ideally both — a hands-on Director who brings AI fluency to the job and onboards teams who are struggling to adopt it.

3. What makes me different. The regulated-industry + AI intersection. I know what it takes to keep systems audit-ready AND move fast with AI. Most people have one or the other.

What the summary does NOT include: job history with dates, buzzword lists, anything that sounds like a cover letter.

Artifact Portfolio (featured highlights)

Each artifact is a card with:

Title and one-sentence description
Subtle skill tags (maps to Nate's seven skills without being explicit)
Each card links to its full detail on the portfolio page (anchor link: /portfolio#lorehaven-mcp). The portfolio page is the canonical detail location. Landing page cards are hooks — the portfolio page is the proof. Deep-linkable so hiring managers can share a specific artifact.

Section A: "How I Build with AI"

1. LoreHaven MCP Server - "A context architecture system that gives AI structured access to a personal knowledge vault." - Skills: context architecture, decomposition, specification precision - Expanded: vault hierarchy design, persistent vs. per-session context, MCP protocol implementation, design decisions and rationale

2. IEC 62304 Compliance Transition - "Led the compliance transition of a live medical device product without disrupting clinical operations." - Skills: trust boundary design, evaluation, failure pattern recognition - Expanded: what was inherited, constraints (live product, clinical operations couldn't stop), process changes, outcome

3. Platform Reliability (Dexcom) - "Took a platform from ~90% to 99.9% uptime, processing 1.7B events/day across 60 microservices." - Skills: failure pattern recognition, cost economics, decomposition - Expanded: what was failing, diagnosis approach, 95% incident reduction, 22% cloud spend reduction, team structure

4. CLAUDE.md & Memory System Design - "A persistent context architecture for AI-assisted workflows across multiple projects." - Skills: context architecture, specification precision - Expanded: how the memory system works, what goes in vs. what doesn't, the layered approach, how it evolves

5. Ship With Intent Content Operation - "A content operation run through AI-augmented workflows — Substack, YouTube, LinkedIn." - Skills: specification precision, evaluation, decomposition - Expanded: how episodes and posts are produced, the workflow, quality bar, content standards

Section B: "How I Create with AI"

1. Agentic (Novel) - "AI drafting a 35-chapter thriller with consistent voice, style rules, and continuity across plotlines." - Skills: specification precision, decomposition, evaluation, context architecture - Expanded: the three-layer context loading protocol, plotline siloing, the ban list, voice calibration, how author and AI collaborate

2. Until The Day Is Over (Album) - "An album produced and released using AI-augmented music production." - Skills: evaluation, specification precision - Expanded: production process, AI's role, creative decisions, release - Content source: TBD — no written production notes exist in repos yet. Nick to provide details, or mark expanded section as post-MVP.

3. nickcarter.ai (This Site) (post-launch addition — add after the site ships) - "Designed and built with AI. Itself a portfolio piece." - Skills: specification precision, evaluation, frontend design - Expanded: how the site was designed through brainstorming sessions, built with Claude Code, design decisions - Note: This artifact cannot be written until the site exists. Add it after initial deployment. Do not ship with an empty expanded section.

Portfolio Page (`/portfolio`)

Full inventory of everything Nick has built or published, organized into the same two sections:

How I Build with AI:

All five artifacts from the landing page, with full detail
Links to GitHub repos where appropriate
Room for future published articles (failure post-mortem, IEC 62304 → AI trust boundaries piece)

How I Create with AI:

All three artifacts from the landing page, with full detail
Links to creative output

External Links:

Ship With Intent (Substack)
Ship With Intent (YouTube)
LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/yes-nick-carter) — Note: the "yes-" prefix is a known issue flagged in resume audit. Update the handle before or shortly after launch if possible. If not, ship with this URL and fix later.
GitHub (if public repos exist or are created)

Future Features (Not MVP)

`/chat` — Ask AI About Me

Claude API integration
System prompt trained on Nick's real experience, projects, expertise
Anti-sycophancy instructions per Nate's article
Honest gap acknowledgment
Demonstrates the AI chat skill itself

`/fit` — Job Description Fit Assessment

Paste a JD, get an honest assessment
Structured output: "strong fit," "worth a conversation," or "probably not your person"
Bidirectional — tells hiring managers NOT to hire Nick when the fit is weak
The confidence to turn away bad fits is itself a signal

Design Principles

1. The site is an artifact. Its design quality demonstrates what Nick brings to products. Generic AI-aesthetic is a failure state. 2. Artifacts over assertions. Everything claims something by showing it, not saying it. 3. Honest about gaps. The "How I Create" section isn't padding — it's a different, harder claim. But gaps (like cost & token economics depth) aren't hidden. 4. Works for cold and warm visitors. 5-second orientation above the fold. Depth for the person who wants to dig. 5. Room to grow. Static MVP now, interactive features later. Migration from static export to @cloudflare/next-on-pages required when adding API routes — documented and planned.

Success Criteria

Quality bar (subjective — guiding principles):

A hiring manager who spends 5 minutes on the site understands: who Nick is, what he builds, how he works with AI, and whether to reach out.
The site itself looks good enough that a hiring manager thinks "this is what he'd bring to our products."
The expanded artifact details sustain genuine investigation — they can't be faked, and they demonstrate real depth.

Launch checklist (concrete — must pass before deploy):

[ ] Site deploys to Cloudflare Pages without errors
[ ] All artifact cards on landing page have populated content (no placeholders except "This Site" which is post-launch)
[ ] All artifact detail sections on portfolio page have real content, not stubs
[ ] All external links (Substack, YouTube, LinkedIn) are valid and working
[ ] Mobile layout renders correctly on iPhone and Android (check two breakpoints)
[ ] Lighthouse performance score above 90
[ ] nickcarter.ai domain resolves correctly

Content Sources

All artifact content can be derived from existing files:

ai-career/ repo: resume audit, TASKS.md, action plans, CLAUDE.md, memory system
chapworks/ repo: Ship With Intent specs, LoreHaven specs, product docs
lorehaven-client/ repo: MCP server implementation
ai-career/content/books/agentic/: drafting skill, bible, chapter outlines
Nick's work history: BD and Dexcom accomplishments from resume files

Timeline

This weekend (before camping Monday): MVP shipped — landing page + portfolio page, deployed to Cloudflare Pages
After camping: Add AI chat and fit assessment features
Ongoing: Add published articles as they're written

Design Spec