How the Pepper Project Started
Honestly, I know almost nothing about development. I took one CS class at the end of high school, and three required courses in college — CS 101, 102, and 201. Java was the only language I ever touched, and even that memory is hazy now. Declaring constants, if-then statements, for-next loops — that's about the extent of what stuck.
Still, I've been an executive at a tech company, and I always carried a quiet guilt about not having enough technical depth. As the age of AI started to arrive, I had a growing fear that I needed at least some hands-on instincts or I'd be left behind. About six months ago, when vibe coding was just starting to take shape, I set up a development environment with ChatGPT, copied and pasted AI-generated code into VS Code, and somehow managed to build a small app. The agent tooling was still rough, but being able to build something at all felt like a genuinely new experience.
As Claude Code kept getting more powerful, I started experimenting more. I built personal websites for my family, then a daily report dashboard to monitor my investment portfolio. I was actually feeling the pace of AI evolution in real time.
Then a post appeared — the co-founder of Kakao wrote about building his own personal AI agent from scratch. My first reaction reading it wasn't anything grand.
"Hm. What if I tried that too?"
This time, I didn't want a toy app. I wanted to actually solve a real problem for my family.
A Family of Four Is No Small Thing
Two working parents, two kids. There's more daily coordination than you'd think — school supplies, tutoring schedules, shared reminders, everyone on different calendars.
It's not that there aren't apps for this. There are too many apps. The problem is they don't talk to each other — and more importantly, they don't know us. There's no shortage of information. What's missing is organization.
You can ask ChatGPT and it'll give you an answer. But you have to re-explain everything every single time. Who I am, how our household runs, what kind of kid Eunsoo is — none of it carries over. It starts from zero every time.
A real assistant doesn't work that way. It already knows your situation, it looks out for things before you even ask, and when you do ask, it takes care of it. What if something like that actually existed?
Hello, Pepper
As the concept took shape, one obvious reference came to mind: Jarvis. Tony Stark's AI.
Not just a command executor. It reads the room before being asked, grows on its own, and quietly enables its owner to do more. That was the closest thing to what I had in mind.
I told my wife, "I'm thinking of building something like Jarvis." Her response was immediate.
"Jarvis is a bad name. Call it Pepper instead."
Pepper Potts — the one who gave Tony Stark wings. Inspired by Jarvis, but evolved further. And that's how the name was decided.
I'm not a developer. I'm not a product person. Until a few months ago, I didn't even know what GitHub was. So this isn't a polished product launch.
It's a raw, unfiltered record of a non-expert leveraging AI to build something. It might be rough. That's fine. That's the whole point of this blog.