A letter from the founder · written in English only

Why I built SubcueAI

Hi — I'm Aaron Cao, the founder of SubcueAI.

A while back, I sat down for an interview at a company I really wanted to work at. I'd been writing software for ten years. I'd done variations of the system design problem they asked me three or four times in side projects. I knew the material cold.

But thirty seconds into the answer, my mind went somewhere else. I lost the thread. I felt the interviewer notice. The rest of the loop was a recovery effort, and I didn't get the offer.

I knew, sitting in that conference room, that I would have given a perfectly good answer if I'd been talking to a friend. The problem wasn't the material. It was the pressure of the format. And no amount of "just practice more" mock interviews was going to fix the specific feeling of freezing in the moment.

That's why SubcueAI exists. Not as a way to misrepresent yourself — I've built four non-negotiables into the product on purpose:

1. Privacy-first.

Audio is processed on your device in real time and never persisted on our servers. There's no recording for us to leak. We don't even store transcripts unless you opt in.

2. Native, not a web wrapper.

We use ScreenCaptureKit on macOS and WASAPI on Windows. No virtual audio cables, no Electron tricks, no extra browser permissions. Native APIs are how serious desktop apps work, and the latency budget for "calm" feedback is too tight for anything else.

3. Sub-400 millisecond first-token latency.

Anything slower than that and your eyes shift off-camera while you read. We optimize the entire pipeline — capture, transcription, model inference, render — to stay under it.

4. A preparation tool, not a shortcut around earning the role.

Every interface choice reflects this. You hear the question, you see a calm prompt, you say your answer in your own words. We're not in the business of deceiving anyone — we're in the business of helping prepared people show that they're prepared. (More on that in our responsible use policy.)

If those four things don't sound like what you want, please don't sign up. We're not for everyone. I sleep better that way.

If they do — welcome. I'm reachable directly:

SubcueAI is bootstrapped, US-incorporated (Subcue AI LLC), and there are no investors above my head telling me to dilute the values above. The product roadmap is whatever helps people who freeze the way I did.

Thanks for reading.

— Aaron Cao
Founder, SubcueAI · Built one engineer at a time