Essays
Notes from building with AI
What works, what breaks, and what it takes to check the difference.
- October 2026 Everyone's Appraiser Is on Their Side I asked an AI what my wife's old pachinko machine was worth. Then I asked from the other side of the deal.
- September 2026 Software Is Just Another Jig I asked an AI for a carburetor tuning guide and got a gorgeous one, for a carburetor I don't own. Why makers should build their own AI tools anyway.
- September 2026 Everyone Has the Button Every platform now ships an AI button. When every competitor has the same tool, the tool stops being an advantage.
- July 2026 Growing Software Like Ripples in a Pond I built an AI that grows software in rings from one sentence. The most useful thing it taught me was the day it passed every test while being useless.
- June 2026 "Which AI Model Is Best?" Is the Wrong Question Match the model to the shape of the task. The model is config; the routing is the strategy.
- June 2026 Why Your SEO Strategy Is Invisible to ChatGPT A growing share of research now starts inside an AI assistant. If your brand isn't in that answer, you don't rank lower. You don't exist.
- June 2026 I Drive Claude Code from a Kindle E-ink is the perfect human-in-the-loop screen. So I built a deliberately dumb terminal that runs on a very old browser.
- June 2026 Stop Asking AI to Roleplay Most AI persona panels are theater. Make the system commit to a falsifiable prediction, log it, and grade it against reality.