Blog
Plain notes on automation, software, and small-business tech decisions.
Your AI Can Draft the Email. Should It Be Allowed to Send It?
A good email draft doesn't earn your AI the Send button. Start with a narrow job, real access limits, and approval that can't be skipped. Here's a delegation checklist for your business.
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Open Source AI Got Good Enough for Real Work. You'll Still Pay for It.
The model doing my everyday drafting is open source. I still pay real money to rent it, and it does not run on my computer. What changed is that open models got good enough for regular business work, and the same model can be rented from a crowd of competing companies. Nobody gets to lock you in anymore.
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Subscription Fatigue Is Real. Custom Apps Are Suddenly Worth It Again.
The average small business owner pays a few hundred dollars a month renting software they'll never own. Building your own was insane at that scale, until the cost of writing code collapsed. Here's the new math, and a three-bucket test for your own subscription pile.
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What AI Search Means When People Stop Clicking
LinkedIn just lost 60% of their search traffic. Not because they stopped ranking — because AI answers questions directly now. Here's what that means for your business.
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When the Interface Flattens: Why Everything Is Becoming a Chat Box
Every app is turning into a text box. Your email, your code editor, your design tools, your CRM. Here's why that's happening, what it means for how you work, and the one thing nobody's talking about: what it might be doing to how you think.
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ChatGPT Will Love Your Terrible App Idea (And That's a Problem)
AI chatbots are trained to agree with you. That makes them the worst possible sounding board for your business idea. Here's how to get honest feedback instead.
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Why Some Custom Software Quotes Get So Expensive
The economics of custom software changed in 2025. If someone quoted you $50K for an app last year, that same project might cost a fraction now. Here's what happened.
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n8n: The Free Automation Tool That Can Replace a Lot of Zapier Work
Remember those 5 Zapier automations from last year? Here's how to run them for $0-20/month instead of $50-100. n8n is the open-source alternative that charges per workflow, not per task.
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So You Have an App Idea: What Nobody Tells You Before You Build
You've got an app idea that could solve a real problem. Before you start getting quotes, here's what actually matters for success - and it's not the technology.
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Why I Now Use Both Gemini and Claude (And When to Use Each)
Gemini 3 is incredible for large text work - summarizing documents, research, long-form analysis. For code, I still reach for Claude. Here's my actual daily workflow and why AI Studio finally earned a permanent browser tab.
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