What shipped September 16, how to tell if you have it, and the 10-minute prompt that builds the deck in one pass. Hi Reader, Claude makes slide decks now. Every one counts against your usage limit. On September 16, Anthropic folded Cowork into regular Claude and switched on two new things: Claude Slides and Claude Docs. Ask for a presentation and Claude drafts it right in the conversation. You edit the slides there, present straight from Claude, or download a PowerPoint or PDF. It's in beta...
13 days ago • 2 min read
Every line item, two I killed this month, and the 10-minute audit to run on yours. Real numbers, no ranges. Hi Reader, Here's my real AI bill, with the receipts. Most "AI stack" posts are a list of logos. This is the invoice. Every line item, what it is for, and which ones I'd cancel tomorrow if the number moved. What I pay every month (September 2026) Claude Max, $200. The one I'd keep if I could only keep one. Every blog post, every audit, every line of the code that runs my sites goes...
27 days ago • 3 min read
Don't refactor. Triage. The order matters. Hi there, You inherited a codebase that's broken. Or you built one that's broken. Either way — you can't ship from it. The most common move is "let me just clean this up first." Don't. Cleaning up is what you do when you have time. Triage is what you do when you don't. And if your business is bleeding revenue or you can't deploy without a panic attack, you don't have time. I call this the Crash Cart. 5 steps. Order matters. Skipping a step is the...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Three flavors of debt nobody warned you about. Hi there, A team I worked with shipped 6 months of features in 8 weeks using Cursor and Claude Code. Founder loved it. Velocity tripled. Then their senior dev quit. The new hire couldn't get the app running locally for 3 weeks. The senior dev — the only human who knew which parts of the codebase were load-bearing — was gone. The new hire kept asking "wait, why does it do this?" The answer was always "because Claude wrote it that way." That's Vibe...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
The 3-stage decision matrix non-technical founders need. Hi there, You're a non-technical founder with an idea. You need to ship something. The order matters. If you skip a stage, the next one breaks. 1. Vibe-code the prototype. Use Lovable, Bolt, Replit — whatever's fastest. Don't hire a developer yet. The point is to learn whether the idea has legs, not whether the code is good. Spend $20–200 here, not $20,000. 2. Hire a developer to ship v1. Once the prototype proves people want this...
2 months ago • 1 min read
10 AI tools I actually keep open. Most aren't ChatGPT. Hi there, ChatGPT is the default. It's not the answer to every question. On a normal workday I have at least 4 AI tools open. None of them is just ChatGPT. Here's where each wins: Claude — writing, analysis, anything where I need a clean first draft. Better prose than ChatGPT. Stays in voice. Cursor or Claude Code — coding. ChatGPT is fine for one-off scripts. For actual codebases, you want a tool that has the whole repo in context....
2 months ago • 1 min read
The same Business Brain system I install by hand — now a build-it-yourself playbook. $397 until the walkthrough videos ship. Hi Reader, For the past couple of months I have been installing Claude for Small Business setups by hand — the 4-layer Business Brain, the connectors, the skills that draft customer replies and Monday-morning reports in the owner’s actual voice. Done-for-you, $4,500 and up. Today I published the playbook I use to do it. Not a lite version — the same system, written out...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Should you build a custom AI agent? Is your industry about to be disrupted? Is it ethical to use AI on client work? Quick answers. Hi there, Format change-up this week. Three questions I keep getting, three answers. 1. "Should we build a custom AI agent for our business?" Almost certainly not yet. Custom agents are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and almost always replace something a ChatGPT prompt could do for $20/month. The exceptions: you have a workflow that runs hundreds of...
3 months ago • 2 min read
A client built custom infrastructure for something ChatGPT does in 4 seconds. Hi there, Got a story for you. A founder I know spent $43,000 building a custom AI agent for their business. Six months of dev time, a contracted AI engineer, a vector database, "agent orchestration framework," the works. You know what the agent did? It categorized customer support emails into eight buckets and routed them to the right person. That's it. I tested the same task in ChatGPT — paste an email, ask which...
3 months ago • 1 min read
