Stepping Stonez provides a questionnaire for users to share their passions, talents and purpose. It sends that data to an AI that provides five career suggestions, thus completing their Ikigai. Finally, it offers the user a learning path as the first steps into their new career.

Many friends of mine hate their job. They feel uninspired and burned out. They see no excitement in their future careers. I want to change that.

After learning about the Ikigai (pronounced icky-guy) concept, I felt it was possible to combine this with an LLM and create a tool to help people find careers suited to their reason for being. I wanted a tool to create a more inspired workforce.

This was my first real endeavour into prompt engineering. Everything I needed to learn was done on the fly. Preventing hallucinations, fine-tuning and returning responses according to a strict JSON schema, all of which I had to figure out as I went. This was a great introduction to the world of AI models. It inspired me to keep pushing myself to see what I could do with them.

I achieved my goal. I created the tool that I wanted. Unfortunately, it didn't get the early traction I had hoped for. It is not the end, though. I have plans to evolve Stepping Stonez and improve it. There is room for something like this to help create a more energetic and inspired workforce. It provided a fantastic learning curve to start working with AI models and inspired me to see what else I could accomplish.