Oscar Hu at a desk inside the stone mill, holding a mug, with a lantern lighting him from the left and the causeway at dusk through the window.

The author of Days Well Made

I’m Oscar Hu.
I want every bit of effort to leave something behind.

For more than a decade I’ve studied and worked across Canada, the UK, China and Spain, in several industries. The further I went, the clearer one thing became: selling time for income, being defined by a job title, trading years for seniority. That life doesn’t fit me.

People used to build standing on experience, and got more valuable as they aged. Not any more. Years of experience are now being remembered more systematically by models, industries turn over faster, moats keep shifting, and more people are running into a midlife crisis.

In 2025 I passed the CFA. It was after that I decided to embrace AI.

Over the next year, while still finding my way, I began building what I call a compounding life: using AI as leverage, running several lines at once and turning the results into assets, a little at a time. There’s one principle: effort has to leave something that compounds.

That’s how AI OS began. At first it was only my past decade and more, starting from Canada, written down as a record of decisions. It grew from there into the whole system it is now: it remembers my judgement, runs my workflows and makes the result of one thing the starting point of the next.

While most people are compounding for someone else, I’m compounding for myself.

You could too. That doesn’t mean this road is easy or certain. It just adds up your effort differently.

Pull up a chair

If we were sitting at this table, you’d probably ask me these.

Why did you stop working for other people?

Because I did the sums. Selling time for income has a ceiling. Be defined by a job title, and when the title goes, so do you. Trading years for seniority doesn’t even hold any more. It took me several industries to see that what I wanted wasn’t a better job.

What actually happened in 2025?

I passed the CFA. In the old script, the next step was a better job. But what I saw was something else: the things I’d spent years learning, the models remembered more systematically than I did. So I didn’t carry on climbing. I decided to embrace AI.

Do you come from a technical background?

No. I don’t speak the language of agents, and I’ve always talked to them in plain words. At first I used them like an employee who only moves when pushed. When I forgot, things sank without a trace. Some professional calls I made before I understood them, and the mess came later.

Those are real wrong turns. How I work now grew out of them.

Is this road certain to work?

No. The tide doesn’t go round me because I’m working hard, and some of the stones get laid wrong. I can’t promise a result. I can promise one thing: this time, the effort doesn’t go into sand.

Won’t AI make all of this obsolete too?

It will make the methods obsolete. Tools, techniques and processes change every year, and I keep changing mine. It can’t make obsolete the judgement you’ve kept, or the systems that know it. The higher the water, the faster the mill turns.

If I want to try, where do I start?

Start with something you finished recently. Ask it: did it just end, or did it leave something? There’s nothing to buy and nothing to learn first. It’s one question, and you can answer it this week.

Something else you’d ask? Write and ask me

Who’s who

What are all these names?

Days Well Made is the name of this site, not a company. The names below are connected, but they aren’t the same thing. Each stone says what it is first, then what it adds to a compounding life.

WEDO

What it isMy company, with its own business and customers. It works on the owner’s side in investment and operations: choosing the project, shaping the asset and making the operation run, across seven lines from real estate to hospitality and retail.

What it addsThe first company actually running this way. Each real problem it solves leaves a process or a judgement for next time.

Visit WEDO’s site
CanTrust

What it isAn AI company. It turns Company OS, Project OS and Trading OS into products that help other people build and run their own company, project or trading system. What the customer owns is a system that keeps producing.

What it addsIt turns the road I’ve walked into something other people can own. The same accumulation stops serving only me.

Write to me about Company OS
East Applied

What it isThe next company, doing solutions between China and Europe. East Applied is a working name, and it’s still being designed. It isn’t a middleman: it designs and provides the solution. It helps European customers fix what hurts in their operations and move their technology forward, and it helps Chinese suppliers enter the European market. The two sides want different things, so they’re two different businesses.

What it addsIt has twenty directions it could go deep in, with irrigation as one example. They’re directions, not twenty finished businesses. It also tests the point this whole road depends on: whether what one company leaves can start the next one further along.
Trading

What it isMy own investment research and trading systems, which will also become a few standard products: research that follows where capital is moving, and automated trading that turns rules into code. Those products will have a website of their own, working name Reason & Rule (investment research & trading tools).

What it addsIt writes judgement and discipline down as rules that can run. The trained eye no longer exists only while I’m watching the screen.

Read the Trading chapter Write to me about access
Projects

What it isSmall businesses that can each stand on their own. Right now there’s Hogar Seguro, which looks after property in Spain for owners who aren’t there, and Spain with Oscar, a day of Spain that’s only yours.

What it addsEach one that lands is another small venture, and leaves the next one a way of working to start from.

Read the Projects chapter
Residency, school and career

What it isThe applications and choices I’ve been through myself, worked into a method other people can follow, with tools you can take away now.

What it addsChoosing well beats trying hard. This experience stops being useful only to me, and for many people it’s the way in.

Read the Residency chapter

I walk it on myself first. CanTrust turns what works into a system you can own. WEDO is a different business, doing the work for owners. It uses this way of working, and it doesn’t sell the system.