Blog

Writing on AI.

How I actually build with AI, and what it changes about the work. Claude Code and Anthropic tools doing the heavy lifting on real projects while I stay in the loop on the decisions, plus the habits that get more done per token and the bigger picture on where people still matter most.

• Sep 2026 Identity Resolution in a Shoebox A relative handed me 120 scanned files of family history. Census pages, ship manifests, naturalization cards, death certificates. No index, no shared key, and three pairs of relatives sharing a name. I've solved this problem before, just never on paper.
• Sep 2026 Four Projects, Four Stacks, One Process An iOS app, a browser game, a book club web app, and Salesforce demos built in an hour. Different technology every time. The only thing that carried over was how I worked, and it comes down to four modes and knowing which one I'm in.
• Aug 2026 Build Your Own Second Brain The last post explained the system. This one is the build: designing the schema, writing your first skill, wiring up the slash commands, and building the read path that makes the whole thing worth having. Budget two hours, then two weeks of tuning.
• Aug 2026 I Built a Second Brain That Writes Itself My notes used to be a graveyard. Now an agent files them, closes the loop on what I finished, and every Friday tells me what I've been avoiding. Here's the architecture, the one skill that changed how I work, and the discipline that keeps it from rotting.
• Aug 2026 Planning a Family Trip With Claude Every fact came from my own confirmation PDFs, and everything that could go stale got looked up. What made it useful was knowing the difference: a transit program I'd never have found, a museum that had quietly closed, and a forecast it couldn't verify and wouldn't invent.
• Aug 2026 Running a Travel Softball Season With Claude Same tools I use to build software: MCP servers, files as source of truth, an instructions file, human approval on the one path that matters. The domain is a 16U travel softball team. It works better than it has any right to.
• Jul 2026 Salesforce Released an MCP Server. I Used It to Cut a Marketing Cloud Build in Half. Salesforce shipped an official MCP server, so I pointed Claude at a real IP warming solution in my Marketing Cloud org. It read the live schema, recommended simplifications, and helped me cut the moving parts roughly in half. Here is what that actually looked like.
• Jul 2026 Close Enough: The Calorie Log I'll Actually Keep My health database could see everything except what I ate. Nutrition was the one input I had to enter by hand, so it was the one I kept abandoning. Here's how I connected Lose It to my data warehouse by talking to it, and why logging something close beats logging nothing perfectly.
• Jul 2026 Building Reply All: A Workplace RPG on a Stack That Costs Nothing I wanted to find the edge of what I could build with Claude and the stack I already had. I never found it. I found a game instead.
• Jul 2026 Using Anthropic Fable Efficiently Fable is Anthropic's new frontier tier, and it's astonishingly good. The fastest way to burn through it is to let it write the code. The better way is to treat it like a principal engineer.
• Jul 2026 Managing Your Context Window with Agents Parallel subagents aren't just faster. They keep raw intermediate output out of your main context window. Here's how I structured my health data warehouse around that idea.
• Jun 2026 Adding a coaching framework to my health database The dashboard was full. The question it couldn't answer: so what do I actually do? Here's how I added Peter Attia's Medicine 3.0 framework to my health data, and what my numbers revealed the moment I did.
• Jun 2026 My new site is live! I had writing scattered across a few different platforms for years. It existed. It just didn't have a home that felt like mine.
• Jun 2026 Getting More from Claude Code The best sessions aren't the longest ones. Efficiency in Claude Code isn't just a cost concern. It's a quality one.
• Jun 2026 Building Current Recovery Score: My First iOS App I wanted to understand my health data better, so I built an app to do it. Every version has taught me something I didn't expect.
• Apr 2026 Building the Health Dashboard No App Would Give Me Every health app shows you the same thing. I needed something different, something built around my specific data, my specific questions, and a diagnosis that changed what I was trying to measure.
• Feb 2026 Building a Second Brain That Understands How You Work Most of what happens in a workday disappears. Not dramatically. It just fades. I built a system to stop that, and six months in, it's showing me things I wouldn't have noticed on my own.
• Jan 2025 The AI Disruption and the Human Element AI is as transformative as the internet was. The differentiator won't be the technology itself. It'll be what humans do with it.
• Dec 2024 The Dichotomy of Artificial Intelligence AI amplifies whatever foundation it's built on. Good data gets more powerful. Bad data becomes a bigger liability. The question is whether you're ready.