Writing · 7 pieces
Build Logs and Thoughts
Two kinds of writing. Build Logs show how the systems on this site work, what they cost and what broke. Thoughts are my take on what is happening in AI. Pieces marked Subscribers are free with your email.
Build Logs
Workflows, frameworks, builds, best practices and the concepts behind them. What I built, how, and what broke.
- Closed, open weight, open source: what the AI model labels mean, and why I'm changing how my agent runs I switched off my always-on AI agent on 22 September. One reason: almost everything it did ran on rented models. What closed, open-weight and open-source models are, what running one at home gets you and costs you, and the mixed setup I'm moving to. 4 min
- Plug your AI into the apps you already use: ten connectors worth setting up, by job Gmail and Calendar are the obvious ones. Ten less obvious connectors by job, and the real ways they went wrong for me. 6 min
- I built and launched a Shopify store with AI in one week. Here is the full blueprint. Tail Friends went from idea to live store, 40 products shipping to 18 countries, two social accounts and a daily content machine in about a week, built and run by AI with one person approving. The accounts, connectors, skills, prompts, costs and numbers. 13 min
- Prompts that force real answers Subscribers AI defaults to agreeable, hedged and fast. Six prompt patterns I use to get it to disagree with me, commit to a view, and do the deep pass instead of the quick one. 2 min
- Stop paying frontier prices for formatting Subscribers My agent system routed work badly in both directions: expensive models doing trivial jobs, cheap models failing hard ones. How I think about matching the model to the job. 2 min
- I audited my own AI agent. Almost everything was open. Subscribers Six agents, nineteen skills, sixteen scheduled jobs, and a security posture I would never accept from a vendor. What the audit found, and the order I'm fixing it in. 3 min
Thoughts
Stories, news, events and the bigger AI trends, with a take.
The first Thoughts land here this week. Subscribers get them first.
Members
The deepest pieces are for subscribers
Full prompts, configs and the numbers behind the builds. Free with your email. Already subscribed? Log in with the same email.