Building Cicero: Process Engineering for Domain-Specific Coaching

I am not a debater.

When my son Luke needed help with his debate prep, I felt the familiar pang of parental inadequacy. I wanted to help. But I lacked the specific skills to coach him on cross-examinations or rebuttal strategy.

But I know process. And I know how to build.

So I stopped trying to be the coach. I built the gym instead.

The Axiom

You don’t need to be an expert in the content to be an expert in the container.

The Build

Instead of faking debate knowledge, I leaned into my strengths. I built Cicero, an AI debate-coach app, on React and Supabase. React is the web framework that draws the interface. Supabase is the database that remembers every session. Together they became a digital sparring partner.

I couldn’t teach Luke the nuance of a specific argument. But I could engineer a system that did three things.

It simulates opponents. Trigger.dev, the tool that runs the AI workflows in the background, generates counter-arguments based on a specific motion. Luke gets a fresh sparring partner on demand.

It enforces structure. The app is a gym. He tracks the flow of a round and times his speeches, rep after rep.

It provides feedback. Not “good job.” Real critiques on clarity and logic.

The Insight

We freeze when we can’t do the thing ourselves. We think support means doing it for them, or knowing more than them.

That is false.

Building the infrastructure is often more valuable. The harness for the raw capability matters more than the capability. AI was the raw intelligence. Luke provided the drive. I provided the architecture that connected the two.

Process is the universal adapter. It let me be useful in a world I didn’t fully understand. That is a principle I explore in Marketing Problems are Infrastructure Problems.