Writing
Field notes
Plain-language guides from things I've actually built with AI — what mattered, and why.
AI wrote every line of my game. These seven steps were mine.
The Pembroke File shipped as one 2,673-line file, and AI wrote all of it. What I supplied was seven decisions — and if you want to build a game like this, those are the transferable part. The how, the what, and the why of each step. None of them is code.
I turned my résumé into an escape room — the game got good when I cut the résumé
I pitched my AI an escape room where reading my résumé is how you get out. Thirty-three prompts later, a stolen-diamond noir leads my site's arcade — and the résumé is gone. I never wrote a line of code. What I did instead turned out to be the actual job.
I built my site's dashboard inside my site — so it went down whenever the site did.
Six hours in, I had a working dashboard for my own site. Then I said the architecture was wrong and pulled it out into its own app. The mistake is one almost everyone makes on their first internal tool, and it only becomes visible after the thing exists.
My publish button worked on day one. Teaching the robot to press it took six failures.
I automated publishing my own articles. The code was written and tested in an afternoon. Getting it to actually work took a full day and six separate failures — five of which reported success. That last part is the whole lesson.
My net-worth tracker runs daily with no server. I moved it without missing a day.
A daily job that records my portfolio, built from a scheduled task and a text file — no server, no database, no API keys. Then I had to move it to a new home without it missing a day, which turned out to be the more useful half of the story.
Before writing about my dashboard, I checked it. My private task list was public.
I'd written a post about a tool I built. Before publishing it, I stopped to check whether anything it touched could be broken into — and found my own task list, personal items included, readable by anyone with the URL. The cause was a free-tier default that works the opposite way most people assume.
My dashboard said the article was published. The article was returning a 404.
I built a dashboard to tell me what's live on my own site. For a few hours it confidently reported an article as published while that exact URL returned a 404 — and 52 passing tests never noticed. Here's why status boards lie in the direction you want to believe, and the habit that catches it.
You don't get replaced for being slow at AI
The worry I keep hearing is 'AI is moving fast and I'm behind.' That's the fixable problem. The real risk is producing more than ever and not being able to tell when any of it is wrong. Three skills fix that — and there's a drill in this post that makes you do all three.
My AI built the whole thing. It handed back the keys, the money, and the final yes.
Twice in one day, my AI built something end to end — a payment system, then a whole website — and both times handed me a short list of what it couldn't do. Nothing on either list was hard. Every item was the same three things — and they map exactly where your job with AI actually is now.
I put an app on my home screen in a day — here are the six prompts
I built a to-do app and put it on my phone's home screen in a day — six prompts, start to finish. The surprising part wasn't that it worked. It's how loose the prompts were: typos, half-sentences, one that's just "what next?" — and that three of the six could be that sloppy because a system I'd built before the project carried the quality the words left out.
I stopped re-explaining myself to my AI. The fix was one file I write by hand.
Claude and ChatGPT remember things about me now — but it's their memory, built automatically and locked inside one tool. What actually changed how I work was the opposite: a file about myself that I wrote and control. It started as a CLAUDE.md and grew into a second brain.
I tried to break my friend's AI-built site — and deleted the hole instead of patching it
Before I let anyone read how I built my friend's ordering site, I had the AI attack it. It found a real hole — the customer's own browser was setting the price. The best fix wasn't a patch. It was a delete.
I built my friend's food truck a full ordering system. I shipped the simple version.
I built a full online-ordering system with Square payments for my friend Robert’s food truck — and then shipped something much simpler. The real skill wasn’t building the impressive version. It was knowing what not to ship.