Insights on commerce frontend development, AI-driven workflows, and developer productivity from a specialist with 30+ years of experience.
Weekly insights on AI workflows, software development & engineering leadership.
Every Claude Code subagent inherits your model, so a file count runs on Opus. I built a mod that asks Jev to pick the cheapest model that can do each job. Lookups got 51% cheaper.
My last newsletter went out August 19. So I built Newsletter Autopilot: if I miss my deadline, BlackOps writes the issue from what I published and tells you it's covering for me.
I asked Claude to read my last 30 Claude Code sessions and suggest mods for how I work. It came back with ten ideas and built all ten as five mods. Here's the prompt, what each mod does, and the bugs a real run caught.
Jev returns typed decisions, not prose. In BlackOps it scores reply targets, checks brand voice on publish, filters feeds and reads task replies.
I've rebuilt my Obsidian daily note over and over since 2021 and wrote up most of the rebuilds as they happened. This is the whole line, what each version fixed, what it left for me, and where it landed.
I started with Rocky reading every reply aloud. It was too much. Now Claude Code cheers once, in Rocky's voice, when something big lands.
Those of us who learned web development by hand are Renaissance painters who lived long enough to see computer paint programs. AI did that to web development in a couple of years, and it changes who gets to commission the work.
Every AI writing tool opens with a blank box and asks what you want to write about. Then the model invents something, and it reads like it was written by someone who has never done the work. The gap worth closing is not writing. It is the hour between knowing something and having published it.
I asked BlackOps for a brain called Deployment Log, backfilled 34 deploys into it out of the build logs, and it caught a failed build I had never recorded plus a fix I had already made too narrowly.
Anthropic now watermarks Claude's text output worldwide. The mark works. It will also stop meaning anything, because assistance is on its way to being universal and a signal present on everything distinguishes nothing.
Medium sent me an email about AI detection and answered its own question. Here is what actually separates writing worth reading from slop, and why twenty rules and an eval gate still didn't catch the bad sentence in this post.
Self-healing software survives its bugs without changing a line. What I run against my projects changes the source. Logging the defect is what fires the work, and most days the completion email is the entirety of my involvement.
I walked 2.6 miles up to Doc Holliday's grave in Glenwood Springs and logged it from my phone. The log, the graphic, and the post all came out of one conversation.
VoiceCommit started on a hiking trail. BlackOps features get kicked off from hotel rooms. Spotter's biggest weekend began with an email read on vacation. One year of the same pattern, with receipts.
My first outside beta tester took Hey Spotter to a university gym and lost his workout history to flaky WiFi. Here's the bug, the offline queue that fixed it, and the airplane mode test that proved it.
Most X growth tools farm the same recycled replies. I built one that answers from your own second brain, so you sound like you, not the boat.
Everyone says reply to twenty tweets a day. BlackOps flags the three or four conversations where I actually have an answer, drafts from what I've written, and tells me no the rest of the time. Real replies, not AI slop.
A year ago voice dictation felt like a gimmick. Now it's load bearing. Here's what actually changed once I stopped typing and started talking.
How a content idea became a written LinkedIn post, a designed carousel, and this blog post itself, all in one 15-minute chat session.
When you ship something new, the hard part is hearing from your first users. The lowest-friction fix is a button that lets them talk. Here is how to add it to your app or site with an agent, and how I put it in Spotter.
Six weeks ago I wrote about logging every workout by talking to Claude. Yesterday I asked Claude to turn that system into a real iOS app. By dinner it was on TestFlight with working subscriptions. This is what actually happened, including the parts where Apple's paperwork fought back.
I carried one airplane around in my head for forty years. Here is how I used Claude to find it, and BlackOps to log it so the question never comes back.
I stopped keeping wine notes and built a Brain instead. Then it watched me buy a bottle and told me what to drink next. Here is why a model beats a notebook.
The More AI Changes, The More It Stays The Same
The replacement conversation is framed as something that happens to you. Flip it. Here's what I've automated in my own workflow, the receipts, and the playbook.
Enshittification is just the rent going up after you can't move out. Here's the mechanism, and the button that lets you actually leave.
For years I fed my Obsidian daily note by hand. Now an agent files my captures overnight, tells my thoughts from my tasks, and I wake up to a clear picture of what's next.
Hundreds of unfinished drafts in twenty years. Forty-five published posts in five months. The only thing that changed was the machine I built between the thought and the publish button. This is what BlackOps is, where it came from, and the proof it works.
BlackOps kept handing me the same SEO advice every week, so I built per-site memory into its GA4 and Search Console tools. Here is how it works.
I audited my site's search performance, rewrote two title tags, and pushed the fixes live without opening Search Console once. The whole thing ran in one chat.
Every BlackOps-hosted site is the same three things: posts, pages, and newsletter signups. So you can just ask your site how it is doing. The interesting part is that everyone asks it something different.
I sit on the chest press machine, phone in hand, and dictate one sentence to Claude. The set is logged. The Apple Watch data fills itself in. Here is how skills and brains turned my gym session into a queryable memory.
A Sortie turns a sentence in your AI chat into a real action. Fix a bug, message your team, fire an automation. Set it up once, fire it by name from anywhere, and your keys never touch the conversation.
If you use Obsidian, you have a daily note ritual. Open today's note. Pull up yesterday's. Copy the unfinished tasks forward. The daily note is supposed to be a living document. In practice, it's a stack of fossils you maintain by hand.
The Day Single-Vendor Architecture Stopped Being Theoretical
A year ago I gave Claude a ROADMAP.md and called it my project manager. The post still ranks. The post is also out of date. Here is what Claude actually manages now.
A room full of arts and humanities graduates booed a speaker for mentioning AI. Their fear is legitimate. Their response is the exact thing that will accelerate the outcome they're afraid of.
Checkout is next. The agent is the buyer now.
From npx to a live post in ten minutes. No forms, no empty dashboard.
Every few months a new "second brain" build hits X. The pattern is real, the folder taxonomies are getting sharper. But every one of them stops in the same place: a markdown file. Here's the wall.
Brian Armstrong announced one-person teams running fleets of AI agents. I wrote about this model months ago. The only difference is he's calling it a pivot. I've been living it.
A thread doing 4.8 million views taught me what's actually wrong with technical content right now.
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I've moved my entire writing workflow into a single Claude chat. Research, write, publish, distribute—all without leaving the conversation. My readers are still in browsers. I'm not.
Obsidian just shipped official Claude Code skills. Here's what it means when your vault already runs a custom skill ecosystem. And yes, I sent this from It's a Small World.
I was tab-switching between GA4 and the chat where I actually do the writing. So I taught the chat to read the numbers. The loop closed.
Einstein famously said he didn't bother remembering things he could look up. Thirty years into this career, I think I finally understand what he meant.
I've been building commerce systems for 30 years. And I can't tell you why I made half the decisions. Not because I forgot. Because I never captured it in the first place.
Gary Vee told a room full of business owners to post on eight platforms every day. Most people nodded and did nothing. The advice is right. The execution is the problem. Here is how I treated it like an engineering problem and built the infrastructure to actually follow through.
I spent an hour researching a truck purchase with AI. At the end I hadn't written a single thing down. Then I asked BlackOps to log it. That one moment changed how I think about what this product actually is.
Brain is a new BlackOps feature that compiles an entire Obsidian folder into a single context note your Claude Projects can read through MCP. No RAG. No scripts. Just everything Claude needs, in one place.
A millionaire copywriter laid out the psychology behind personal brands that actually make money. Every principle she named is a systems problem. Here is what that system looks like.
I bought the Mac mini. I posted that it was the future. A month later I was waking up every morning to fix something that broke overnight. Here's what I learned.
I didn't open a second tab. I didn't copy-paste anything. I had a thought, told Claude, and this post landed in my BlackOps queue. Here's exactly what happened.
I am certain that AI writing assistance is going to be the norm soon
Every layer of automation creates a new layer of complexity that needs builders. That's been true for thirty years. It's still true now.
Everyone says "we can use AI for that." But if your plan is to do that reliably, repeatedly, and at scale, you don't have a solution. You have a demo.
The BlackOps MCP is live. Connect Claude or any MCP-compatible AI client directly to your BlackOps Center account and let it draft posts, write tweet threads, schedule content, and run full campaigns, all inside your actual content system, with your actual voice.
AI tools are making the software development process visible for the first time. As tokens accumulate, a new productivity signal is emerging.
AI Isn’t Replacing Developers. It’s Replacing the Space Between Them.
OpenClaw controlling Blender/Figma/After Effects is the real unlock for AI in creative teams: not generating art, but automating the click-loop work around creation.
Larry drove 8M views in a week by running distribution on autopilot. The lesson isn’t the skill — it’s that distribution is becoming an operator problem with an agent solution.
Someone showed OpenClaw controlling Blender this week. The 3D artist comments said 'I need this.' That's a signal — and it tells you exactly what the next 18 months of operator adoption look like.
Eight real failures from running an AI operations agent for a month. The problem isn't intelligence — it's architecture.
Last year I predicted the future dev team: one senior engineer and an army of AI agents. Tonight, from a phone at Epcot, I watched 10 AI agents run a standup, find production bugs, debate priorities, deploy fixes, and verify them. The prediction is no longer a prediction.
Obsidian 1.12 shipped a CLI. The internet yawned. Agents could already read files. They're missing the point entirely.
A Razorfish call, an Oakley project, and two and a half years of flying every other week changed how I worked—and turned me into a consultant.
A great video just described the AI development revolution happening right now. I've been writing about it — and building it — for months. Here are the receipts.
Instead of trying to get better at marketing, I built a system to notice patterns in real conversations. Here's how I used OpenClaw to replace guessing with observation.
I spent 10 days building an AI workforce. Then Anthropic made my tool change its name. This is the real story — crashes, renames, and shipping anyway.
A real feature shipped in hours — not because of AI magic, but because the architecture already fit. How planning with Claude Code made the difference.Untitled Post
Notes from two weeks of real-world building with Claude Code—what changed, what didn’t, and what became visible once the tools stayed open during actual work.
Discover what junior developers should focus on in 2026, from AI-assisted coding to core fundamentals, and learn how to adapt your skills to modern workflows.
Discover why vibe coding is not the real problem in AI-assisted development and how clear thinking, intent, and constraints turn it into a powerful workflow
Does archiving ChatGPT chats save space? Does deleting lose anything? Here is what archive vs delete actually does, plus a simple rule for what to keep.
Discover how AI can expose deeper leadership and communication problems, and learn what it really reveals about trust, culture, and decision making in teams
Discover why travel, hotels and movement spark my most creative ideas, boost deep work, and strip away fake productivity so real focus finally shows up
CTOs face a growing AI power gap as quiet users gain leverage and honest engineers fall behind. Learn how culture, ethics, and leadership decisions shape AI risk
BlackOps Center: The Accidental Product That Became My Next Chapter
AI can 10× developer productivity, but enterprise culture blocks it at every turn. Inside: the fear, politics, and outdated processes that keep teams from using the tools that would make them faster.
Learn how Mission-Command Development lets a senior engineer direct AI agents to deliver faster, higher-quality software in 2025’s competitive tech landscape.
How a single senior developer with AI agents can replace entire development teams, transforming software delivery from slow team coordination to rapid mission command execution.
How a vacation without my laptop led me to build VoiceCommit - an AI-powered voice-first tool that turns spoken commerce and development ideas into GitHub Issues, PRs, and updates.
How I created and use a command-driven system in my everyday commerce development process with Claude Code to document progress with visual screenshots - giving me complete control over when and how enterprise development gets documented.
From a simple UI request to shipping a complete Asteroids game—discover how Claude Code transformed casual conversation into production-ready code with authentic 1979 arcade gameplay.
Discover how combining Claude Code with a simple ROADMAP.md file transformed my personal project management and delivered consistent progress on my blog.
A deep dive into managing AI agents in development teams, from initial magic to debugging hallucinations. Learn how prompt infrastructure and team guardrails are reshaping the modern developer workflow.
Career guidance from 30 years in commerce development - from accidental start to Commerce Frontend Specialist. Navigate your tech career with insights on continuous learning, mentorship, and strategic growth in e-commerce.
Step-by-step guide to automatically adding current weather, sunrise, sunset, and moon phases to your Obsidian daily note using iOS Shortcuts and wttr.in API integration.
Master iOS Shortcuts to add real-time local weather data to your Obsidian daily note with custom emoji mapping, location detection, and automated template insertion.
Learn how to automate daily note creation in Obsidian using iOS Shortcuts with templates, calendar integration, and scheduled automation for seamless morning workflows.
Transform your iPad into a development workstation with VSCode web. Install vscode.dev as a home screen app, sync settings, and code from anywhere with GitHub integration.
Automate meeting imports from Outlook to Obsidian daily notes using icalBuddy and Templater. Never manually copy calendar events again with this macOS workflow solution.
Essential VSCode extensions for commerce frontend development and team leadership. Tools that enable efficient development across multiple e-commerce projects and remote team management.
Build a Dataview query to surface your latest Readwise highlights in Obsidian daily notes. Automatically review book highlights with custom formatting and date-based filtering.
Complete review of the official Readwise Obsidian plugin featuring automatic syncing, custom formatting, backlinks, and spaced repetition to transform reading highlights into knowledge.
A complete walkthrough of my Obsidian daily note template with dynamic task tracking, automated workflows, and Dataview queries to build a knowledge base from daily work.