Behind the Beat

I kept losing my place in group ukulele—not on the chords, but on when to strum. The melody moves; the beat doesn’t. That distinction is the whole reason dotBeat exists.

Some online music pitches wrap ordinary ideas in dramatic packaging. Here is the plain-English decoder for moveable shapes, scale-degree feelings, and so-called fretboard freedom.

I built dotBeat with a team of AI agents and no idea which robot was good at what. ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Codex — four very different personalities, four very different jobs. Here’s who did what.

I tried to build a music studio using the digital equivalent of a butter knife: Windows Notepad. The AI agents kept handing me buckets of code and wishing me luck. After a week of squinting at 2,000 lines of undifferentiated JavaScript, I finally asked the obvious question.

I signed up for ukulele lessons, stared at a chord sheet, and had no idea what was supposed to happen between the chords. Nobody tells you this when you start: a chord sheet assumes you already know the song.