AI tools

In two months I tore down three tool setups and over twenty thousand lines of code. What followed me to today was a few plain text files that spell out what I want.

I hooked a vision model up to my personal knowledge base expecting it to search inside article screenshots too, and the test came back with zero images. The model wasn't the problem; the pipeline that turns a webpage into "clean text" had already stripped the pictures out before the model ever saw them. The ceiling on an AI tool's capability is often set upstream, where you're not looking.

The one-person company is having a moment: one person plus a fleet of AI agents, costs cut to one-twentieth of hiring someone. But after running my own one-person-plus-AI system for two years, I worked out what this business actually lives on: the work that leaks down from upstream. Big companies slice whole functions into outsourced projects, and the one-person company catches the water that trickles to the very bottom layer. Some people take home a million a year doing this; others watch their income shrink by 90%. Plus three signals for reading whether the window is opening or closing.

Call an AI API for a dead-simple classification task and get back an empty string? Don't blame your network or your code first. A lot of models now default to a 'thinking mode' that can quietly burn your entire output budget on a scratchpad you never see.

When you self-host a knowledge base, the vendor leaves a shortcut on the table: reuse your old hosted account's API quota and save money. Here's why I skipped it on August 6th, and the two bills that shortcut actually carries.

Everyone's selling the idea that AI lets ordinary people leapfrog ahead. What I've actually seen running my own AI pipelines says the opposite: AI amplifies the judgment you already have. It doesn't hand you judgment you don't.

AI flattened the barrier to building. The barrier to selling did not move. Specs are for peers; the buyer only wants their own problem solved.

After two rounds of reviewing AI writing tools I adopted none. Their default path helps you fake faster, not do real work faster.