Chapter two

brasslit

Not affiliated with or endorsed by the College Board.Brasslit is a working name.

A side project that's incredibly useful to me right now, as someone taking the SAT, and a place where the stakes are a little lower than on a bigger project.

I built the first version in a night to help my brother and me in our tutoring sessions. When our tutor saw it, his eyes lit up: "You could sell this." I went down a rabbit hole after that, and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty capable platform.

Try one.

Take it the way you'd take the real thing. It's keeping track.

Three things

Questions that are actually good

One of the tricky parts has been making practice questions that are both correct and at a difficulty like the real thing. I've had trouble getting models to judge questions well. It's still an active area of trial and error: different techniques, different models, different ways of building a system to judge.

The replay

Every click on a question is recorded with its timing, so an attempt can be played back. Right or wrong at the end isn't that useful on its own. What I find useful is seeing where I had the right answer and talked myself out of it, or crossed it out early. That says more about how I'm thinking than the score does.

Without a tutor

The goal is for students to be able to use this on their own, without a tutor. This first version is geared toward having a tutor help you out.

What I learned

Build something you'd use yourself. Trivial advice, I know, and I've always tried to. This is the first time I've watched it play out: I was the main user from day one, and most of what's good here came from that.

I designed it and own every product decision. Claude Code wrote the code. OpenAI's Codex reviewed, tested and judged it, and never wrote a line.

Every student, tutor and question here is invented.