Jackson Kirkley
JK

Jackson Kirkley

I build the systems small businesses run on.

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Baylor Business Scholar  ·  Hankamer School of Business, Waco, Texas

June to August 2025

Rhombus Systems

Security technology  ·  AI Automation Intern

  • The Mission

    My first real job came with a one-line assignment: find something worth improving. The problem I picked was how long it took anyone to find an answer buried in the company's own documentation.

  • The Build

    I built an assistant in Slack, on n8n, that answers from the company's official internal documents. It numbers and categorizes each one as it arrives, and it re-files updated versions on its own. It pulls the right passages back and answers only from them.

  • The Result

    It stayed consistently accurate across the documentation, and it's the project that convinced me I could build the systems a business runs on myself.

n8n  ·  Slack  ·  Supabase  ·  OpenAI  ·  ChatGPT for the code

The assistant's workflow, drawn as an n8n canvas. New documents arrive in Slack, are numbered and categorized, split into passages, embedded with OpenAI and stored in a Supabase vector database. A scheduled job checks for updated documents and re-embeds the ones that changed. A remove command finds a document and deletes it. A question goes to an AI agent that searches Supabase, reranks the results and answers only from the documents, then replies in Slack.

20Klines of code, written by AI tools I directed

Outside the work

Three things have had most of my time outside class: five years of water polo, the music that started on my grandfather's saxophone, and the Vault, the system of AI agents I built for myself.

  • Water Polo

    • 3 section championships
    • All-League and All-Section First Team
    • Most Valuable Defensive Player
    • Captain, JV and varsity

    I played water polo for five years as a 2-meter guard, and freshman year I was made a captain on JV, which wasn't the roster I wanted. My coaches challenged me to lead by raising my teammates' level instead. So I stayed for varsity practices, studied film, and worked with the newer players one on one, and that group won section championships the next two seasons. On varsity I called the defense while guarding my own center: what we should be doing, how we'd adjust, and which threats to watch.

  • Music

    • CMEA Capitol Section Honor Band
    • Saxophone, guitar, piano
    • Songwriting, mixing, production
    • Worship lead, Restoration Life Church

    I started on my grandfather's old saxophone in elementary school, and by middle school I'd made first chair. Freshman year I failed the blind audition for honors concert band after three weeks of theory prep. That year I taught myself guitar, piano, and audio engineering from YouTube, and put together a sax quartet to play carols around the neighborhood. The next year I passed the audition easily, and since then I've written, mixed, and produced my own songs. I also led worship at Restoration Life Church and for the Arcade youth group.

  • The Vault

    • Built on Claude Code, since June 2026
    • Four specialist agents
    • Canvas, Gmail, Google Calendar, Todoist

    I'd rather build a process once than do the same thing by hand twice, so I started the Vault: Claude agents on a Mac mini that stays on. One agent files my class notes and writes my study drills, and one runs my email, calendar, and to-do list. Another keeps my ledger, and another tells me when a job didn't run. Every decision I make with it gets written down, over 180 so far, and an agent reads them before it acts, so it stops asking me things I've already answered. When I overrule it, that gets written down too, and nothing leaves the machine without my go.

Whyfinance

Jackson Kirkley

Baylor Business Scholar, Hankamer School of Business
Waco, Texas

I'm in my first year at Baylor's Hankamer School of Business, learning the hard skills it takes to actually run and scale a company. That starts with standardizing reports and company data. It's terminology and foresight I didn't have when I was building the systems that recorded it.

What I want to understand next is how AI is actually being used in real financial services, in a way that's useful to analysts and all the way up the chain of command.