ADLER

Adler is my digital book companion in the age of AI. I read books I own, and Adler asks me questions and challenges my knowledge, to make sure I retain learnings over time.

I took inspiration from Mortimer Adler and his book "How to read a book" where he outlined 4 levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical.

We've been reading books the same way for more than 500 years. Then the kindle arrived. But now the books we purchase via kindle are not ours anymore. We can't read them outside kindle.

Imagine going to a bookstore to purchase some physical books, only to be told "you can't read them outside of this Bookstore, sorry".

That's what kindle is. That's what Apple books is.

I can't commercialize Adler because it would be flagged as not following "fair use" so it's my own tool.

Another reason why I decided to build Adler is to better encode learnings. I used to dread that feeling of finishing a book and having absolute no clue of what I read. I would have to take a lot of notes, or create diagrams, but that meant reading from my laptop.

Then I asked myself: what if I could have a "chat with the book" experience in addition to a "duolingo" experience where I am challenged with quizzes to test my understanding? That's how Adler came to be.

Adler was my school to learn how to ethically use LLMs and tools such as Cursor and Claude Code to become a designer who not only designs, but also ships his own apps and tools.

Maybe in the future I commercialize Adler if I find a viable path, where people buying digital books can read them wherever they decide to do so.

✦ Learning iOS
✦ Learning Claude Code, cursor
✦ Theming
✦ Git workflows
✦ Context engineering
✦ Animations
✦ Landing page
✦ Building my own AI chatbot
✦ Quizzes