Writing
The archive
My earlier field notes, written for the site's older design. I don't keep them up to date.
13 notesJuly 8 to August 28, 2026
Working With AI
I spent 577 credits teaching an AI to spin a can. Then I built the can.
I burned 577 credits trying to get an AI to show the same can from every side. It never managed it once — and that's not bad luck, it's how these tools work. The fix took one sentence, no special skills, and it changed how I use AI images entirely.
Working With AI
AI research reads like the truth. Here are six checks I run before I believe it.
I had a research report with 45 claims in it. Nine were false and twelve couldn't be checked at all — because not one of the agents had opened a single original document. It read perfectly. Here are the six checks I run now, and the one that catches the most.
Working With AI
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.
Working With AI
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.
Build Breakdown
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.
Working With AI
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.
Working With AI
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.
Working With AI
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.
Working With AI
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.
Working With AI
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.
Working With AI
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.
Build Breakdown
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.
Build Breakdown
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.