Ben Gleeman

Artificial Intelligence

Learning AI by
building with it

I started without a coding background. Since then, I’ve built a personal knowledge system, dashboards, and this website with AI. Alongside those projects, I’ve been studying how the tools work and where they fall short.

~/iCloud/SecondBrain

$ brain "who did I meet at dinner?"

→ scanning people/ · 340ms

Alex Chen · dinner · Jan 14

Sarah Park · finance · mutual friend

AI / Personal Tool

Second Brain

A personal knowledge system for keeping track of people, ideas, and things I want to remember. Built with AI and stored in plain text files.

Read the project →

bengleeman.com

Built with Claude

Design / Development

This website

I built this site with AI, working through the layout, copy, and interactions without writing the code by hand.

You're looking at it

Self-Directed Study

✓How language models work

✓Prompting

✓Attention and embeddings

✓AI agents

Building projects

Education

Learning AI

A record of the courses I’ve taken, the tools I’ve used, and the projects I’m working on.

Follow my progress →

Portfolio

Selected work

~/iCloud/SecondBrain

$ brain "what does my sister care about?"

→ scanning people/sister.md

→ cross-ref 14 mentions across 6 files

→ generating answer

✓ done · 340ms

Folder· routing

📁SecondBrain

📄_index.md

📁people/

›sister.md

›advisor.md

📁events/

📄inbox.md

→ writing to people/sister.md · ## Interests

FeaturedAI / Personal Tool

Second Brain

Notes about people, places, and ideas tend to end up in different places. I built a system that organizes them into files I can ask questions about later.

Read the project →

606

General
Members

Analysts

100%

Sophomore placement
in financial services

10w

Weeks of
training

Cornell University ● Ithaca, NY ● Investment Banking

FounderEducation / Community

Banking At Cornell

I founded BAC to make investment banking preparation available to more Cornell students. The club grew to 606 general members and 82 analysts, with an open membership program and a dedicated recruiting curriculum.

Read the story →

Nonprofit

Doorstep Donations

A student-led food collection program. Donors fill a bag at home, and volunteers pick it up and deliver the food to local pantries.

Read the story →

Personal Philosophy

Master of My Own
Destiny

One of the beliefs that has shaped me most is that I am the master of my own destiny.

To me, that does not mean everything is within my control. It means that my effort, discipline, attitude, and response to adversity are always my responsibility. It is both liberating and uncomfortable: liberating because it means growth is possible, and uncomfortable because it removes the excuse of passivity.

I believe success is rarely the result of one perfect decision. More often, it comes from repeated small choices made with consistency over time. Show up. Do the work. Learn quickly. Treat people well. Keep your promises. Build momentum. Repeat.

That is the standard I try to hold myself to.

BenGleeman

Learning AI bybuilding with it

Selected work

Master of My OwnDestiny

Get in touch

Ben
Gleeman

Learning AI by
building with it

Master of My Own
Destiny