Aakash Pahuja · Product Designer × Vibe Coder

Products aren’t built with prompts.
They’re forged through obsession.

I design, build and ship digital experiences end-to-end — and I sweat the last 2% most people never notice. Users feel it anyway.

Aakash Pahuja in his studio at night, guitar in hand, black coffee on the desk.
Hello · 01

Design is how it works — and how it feels.

I’m a passionate product designer and vibe coder who loves creating flawless digital experiences. By day I do product management at American Express; by night I design, code and ship my own apps — every flow, every empty state, every haptic.

Deeply caring about the end user isn’t a line on my resume. It’s why everything I ship has an undo, a dark mode, and copy written for the person having a bad day.

9+ years in product @ Amex 6 apps designed & shipped solo 0 templates used black coffee
Work · 02

Six ideas, forged into apps.

Designed, built and shipped end-to-end. No team, no templates — just problems I cared about and the obsession to finish them properly.

01 / 06 — ANDROID

Spends

Know what’s actually left.

  • Smart Cycle budgets by your salary and each card’s own billing cycle — not the calendar month.
  • Reads bank SMS on-device with one-tap add — and learns your categories and what to ignore.
  • Recurring autopilot, category splits, home-screen widgets and encrypted Drive backup.
Private · Offline-first · ~25 Indian banks parsed
Spends analytics screen
Spends home screen
Spends recurring payments screen
02 / 06 — ANDROID

Notification Digest

A calmer phone, without missing what matters.

  • Intercepts the noise and delivers clean, scheduled digests — OTPs, calls and messages stay real-time.
  • An inbox that works like email: search, filters, swipes and deep links back to the exact thread.
  • A quiet counter of every interruption you never felt.
Kotlin · Jetpack Compose · Material 3
Notification Digest inbox
Notification Digest dashboard
Notification Digest app selector
03 / 06 — ANDROID

ColorCloset

Outfits from the colours you already own.

  • A swipeable deck of colour pairings built only from your wardrobe — double-tap to save, mark worn.
  • Tuned to your skin tone on the 10-point Monk scale, grounded in real colour science.
  • The gap engine names the one colour that unlocks the most new looks.
4 wardrobes · Pantone-referenced dataset
ColorCloset skin tone selector
ColorCloset style deck
ColorCloset what to buy screen
04 / 06 — ANDROID

Pause

A minimal doom-scrolling interrupter.

  • Watches the foreground app; after your chosen stretch of continuous scrolling, a calm glassmorphic overlay appears.
  • Not a blocker — it breaks the momentum and hands the choice back to you.
  • No accounts, no analytics, nothing ever leaves the device.
Interrupt the autopilot · Let the user choose
Pause home screen
Pause interrupt style settings
05 / 06 — ANDROID

ForgeAI

Your gym. Your AI coach. Your lifetime progress.

  • One conversation drives everything — “bench 80 for 8, 7, 6” becomes structured training data.
  • Progressive-Overload Coach: last session → today’s target → and the why behind it.
  • Bring a Claude or OpenAI key — or run fully offline with the built-in local coach.
AI fitness OS · demo for gym owners
ForgeAI chat screen
ForgeAI home screen
ForgeAI analytics screen
06 / 06 — ANDROID

BragBuddy

Twenty seconds a day. An always-ready appraisal doc.

  • Speak your day; it becomes clean, categorised bullets organised around your own appraisal framework.
  • At review time: a crisp, curated summary you paste straight into the form.
  • Anonymous and local-first — audio never leaves the phone.
Voice-first · works instantly, no setup
BragBuddy goals screen
BragBuddy home screen
BragBuddy summary screen
Career · 03

Product management, at enterprise scale.

AMERICAN EXPRESS

Sr. Associate — Digital Product Management

Current

ComXHub — Intake & Governance Portal

Driving product strategy for an enterprise portal that modernises how customer communications are created, governed and delivered across markets — one digital entry point for the entire lifecycle, inside a large multi-year transformation program.

Completed

Raven Migration

Led end-to-end discovery and migration of hundreds of legacy communication templates across 19 markets to a modern platform — reverse-engineering undocumented workflows and training engineering teams on the framework that made it repeatable.

Before that: nearly a decade at Amex across UAT delivery (90+ projects, 500+ communications) and customer-operations leadership — plus a string of founder ventures along the way: a tech consultancy, a D2C apparel brand, an online grocery store and a music-gear brand. Product mindset, learned the hard way.

Play · 04

The obsession doesn’t clock out.

Iron
0 kg

lifted since 2022 — every rep logged on Hevy. (Roughly one adult T-rex, if you were wondering.)

This is what keeps me sane and joyful.

Follow the log on Hevy
Hevy workout tracker profile
Strings & voice

Guitar, voice & a camera.

This is what keeps me calm — and guilt-free when the gaming runs long.

Covers, mostly — recorded on the same desk the apps are built on.

PS5

Three worlds I keep coming back to.

Great games are great product design — ruthless onboarding, honest difficulty, reward curves that respect you. I take notes.

Elden RingElden Ring God of WarGod of War Black Myth: WukongBlack Myth: Wukong
Connect · 05

Let’s build something
people love.