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Writing · Build Logs · 7 pieces
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
- The light said yes and did nothing My smart home system passed every test while its entire outbound command path was dead. What that taught me about testing AI-built software as a non-engineer. 3 min
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The Build Log
One system teardown a week. What I built, what it cost, what broke, and the exact prompts that did the heavy lifting. No tool listicles.
- A full build teardown with architecture
- The prompt or config that unlocked it
- The failures, with root causes
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