// writing
Notes from production
AI agents that have to work at 3am, building DogBase, founder notes, and the occasional experiment. Written from the work, not about it.
Latest · 13 Nov 2026 · 4 min read
My n8n Pipeline Finds Cold Email Leads. I Still Approve Every One.
My Instantly account had room for 1,000 leads and I was using 600, while a tenth of what I sent bounced. So I built a pipeline that finds K9 teams, checks every lead, writes one line in my voice, and asks me before anything goes out.
Building AI
- 8 Nov 2026I Swapped Apollo for Instantly. The Real Problems Were Somewhere Else.Replacing Apollo in my AI lead pipeline took a few API calls. Reading the first live run found a wrong sheriff, a 12% bounce rate and failed lookups that looked like normal results.Building AI4 min
- 6 Nov 2026I Built an AI Video Editor in Two Days. The Bottleneck Is My Dog.Nine phone clips from walks with my search and rescue dog became six captioned, branded Shorts, scheduled on my own Postiz. AI did the cutting, captions and scheduling. It can't film the dog.Lab4 min
- 29 Oct 2026I Let AI Agents Run My Dev Team for Two Days. Here's What It Cost.Two days of Claude Code running a team of AI agents on a DogBase launch: it froze my Mac and one feedback round cost about 1.9 million tokens. Where the tokens went, and the five rules I changed.Building AI6 min
- 27 Oct 2026I Built a Claude Code Mod So I Stop Scrolling Up for the Login Claude Gave MeClaude Code's replies are hard to read in a narrow side panel, and the one line I need later is buried in them. margin is a free Claude Code mod that redraws replies answer first and keeps the values I choose one click away.Lab3 min
- 23 Oct 2026I Built a Claude Code Mod That Quizzes Me on What Claude Just ChangedAgents write code faster than I can read it. Apprentice is a free Claude Code mod that maps how much of my repo I still understand, and asks one short question about each change while Claude keeps working.Lab5 min
- 22 Oct 2026Superpowers made my Claude Code better and more expensive. Here's what one security update cost.I audited how my Claude Code setup spends tokens. The biggest cost was the Superpowers workflow on one security update, and the reviews that cost the most caught real security bugs.Building AI8 min
- 18 Oct 2026I Built a Tool to Catch AI Agents Faking Tests. In 201 Merged PRs, They Didn't I built trustbut to check whether an AI agent's tests actually prove its change. Then I ran it on 201 real pull requests to find out if it was worth using. The agents did better than I expected, and most of what my tool found didn't matterLab7 min
- 18 Oct 2026Why I Moved DogBase to a Monorepo in the Age of AI CodingI merged all six DogBase repositories into one. Here's why AI coding made the move worth it, and how I set up Claude to work across the whole product.Building AI7 min
- 7 Oct 2026Why My AI Lead Generation Is a Pipeline, Not an AgentPeople keep asking why I didn't just use an AI agent to find leads. The short answer is that I already know the steps. A fixed pipeline with one AI step is cheaper, steadier and much easier to debug.Building AI4 min
- 4 May 20265 Things That Break AI Agents in ProductionMost AI agent projects don't fail because of the model. They fail because of the surrounding engineering. Here are the 5 things that break agents in production and how to fix each one.Building AI5 min
- 26 Mar 2025Moving from SaaS to Open Source: A Bootstrapper's Guide to Financial OptimizationDiscover how we reduced operational costs by 75% at DogBase by strategically replacing expensive SaaS tools with open-source alternatives, allowing us to launch with competitive pricing while maintaining full control…Founder Notes4 min
- 3 Mar 2025Beyond Model Wars: Why Context and Integration Are the Real AI BattlegroundsWhile tech giants compete on model specs, the true AI revolution lies in context length and meaningful integration. The future belongs not to those with the biggest models, but to those who apply AI with deep…Signals4 min
- 2 Dec 2024Flutter Remove The Hashtag From URLAs you know, Flutter web is a single-page app (SPA), and like most SPA apps, they add a hashtag in the URLLab1 min
- 1 Dec 2024How to set dynamic open graph meta tags in your Flutter web appWhen I took on this new project, I encountered various minor challenges with Flutter Web, but one huge one was updating meta tags or open graph tags for dynamic sharing.Lab5 min
Building something with AI?
Fractional CTO, AI agents, or a rescue for an AI-built app.