How MockingBird started

It started in early 2026, while Destiny was teaching himself TypeScript — the kind of thing nobody hands you in a classroom, so he put in the extra hours on his own learning from AI tools like Claude, building projects like GO alongside it.

Around the same time, he started working with Forkhive, his brother Benjie's company, which gave him occasional access to tools like Claude Code. But some months the budget didn't stretch that far, and he'd be back on the free, heavily restricted version of Claude on the web — building nearly 16 hours a day, most days of the week.

That restricted plan meant getting locked out constantly after sending too many messages. Switching away from Claude wasn't really an option either — no other model matched it on coding and reasoning, in his experience, and every time he tried DeepSeek or ChatGPT instead, he'd start completely cold. No context, no familiarity with what he was building, and code he didn't trust — even after manually rebuilding context for them. So he'd end up back on Claude, hit the same wall, and repeat.

Meanwhile, Dominion — Destiny's coursemate and friend since early days at Babcock — had built the entire backend for an earlier project of Destiny's, called GO. GO ended up on pause once it scaled past what Destiny knew how to build at the time, which is exactly what pushed him to properly learn TypeScript in the first place.

Somewhere on Destiny's list of projects to build was the last item on it: an AI session manager that could carry context across every AI chat platform. After finishing an MVP of Effiong, with exams almost done, he came back to that idea — except now it wasn't abstract. He pivoted it into something built directly around the pain he'd just spent months living through. He scaffolded it that same day, started on the frontend, and wrote the first product doc before the day was out.

After exams, back home, he kept building — refining it, adjusting it, actually using it to solve his own problem. Somewhere in that process, it stopped feeling like a personal tool and started feeling like something worth building as a real product. He reached out to Dominion, who'd collaborated with him before and had already floated the idea of starting a company together. Dominion said yes, and came on as co-founder.

That's where MockingBird started.