About threndle.ai

Who's behind it

I'm James Forrester. I'm originally from Calgary, and I now live and work in Chilliwack. My phone number still has its 403 Calgary area code. I've had it for almost thirty years, and if you call it, you'll get me.

I've worked as a blacksmith, a horse trainer and a guide in Banff. I've also worked in commercial solar, and I've been a sales manager at a few dealerships. Over the years, I've owned four businesses.

I've completed my Claude certification, and I'm now working on my NVIDIA certifications.

Why automation, and why me

I'm Gen X, and I've managed ADHD most of my life. Process is how I keep things in order, and it has run through every job I've had.

My career began in restaurants, some of the most process-driven and cost-conscious businesses there are, and moved through sales and finance. Each taught me the same lesson: understand the performance metrics, and you can see where a business is losing time and money.

I've always been fascinated by how numbers model the world, from the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to fractals. I've applied that to trading automation, writing Pine Script strategies built on nearest-neighbour models with Lorentzian distance.

My interest in automation started at home. In 2009, I kept leaving the lights on, so I set up home automation with Zigbee and Z-Wave to handle them. Since then, newer AI platforms have changed what automation can do for an everyday business owner.

I've also always loved taking systems apart to find out why they work. Once I understand one, I want to make it more efficient. My managers didn't always share my enthusiasm, but the habit stuck, and it's most of what this job is.

So when I look at your business, I ask why things are done the way they are, which parts eat your week, and what would change if those parts ran on their own.

Why I build on Claude

I tried several platforms before choosing one. n8n is fantastic for simple automations, but back then building in it meant writing JSON files by hand, which was tricky. With APIs and MCP servers, it's much easier now, and n8n still does a fair amount of work for us. OpenClaw worked until I ran into a security issue I wasn't willing to put in front of a client. I also spent time with Hermes, which is capable but assumes you're comfortable configuring an open agent stack from scratch. Most small business owners shouldn't have to be.

I spent a spring reading documentation instead of marketing pages, and Claude came out ahead because its security documentation answered my questions. The longer version is in Why I build threndle.ai on Claude.