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pip install common-sense --break-system-packages*
Why my store scan only believes a slice of the famous numbers
October 9, 2026 · 5 min read
I built a free scan that shows online stores where they lose sales and roughly what each leak costs. Pricing each leak meant reading the studies behind the famous ecommerce numbers. Some of them surprised me, and not always in the direction I expected.
Read postWhat is your calcium?
September 19, 2026 · 6 min read
The most quoted graduation speech of my generation was never given, and the only line its author vouched for is the only one that survived 29 years of trials. The two she waved away got taken apart. Worth knowing which kind of advice you are running your business on.
Read post69 rules I had to give twice
August 28, 2026 · 7 min read
Coding agents write every conversation to a file on your own disk, and then nobody ever opens it again. I built something that reads them. Fifteen seconds later I was looking at 69 instructions I had already given once, and by that evening two audits had found the tool breaking its one promise.
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It's not just about the coffee or long dead gurus
July 31, 2026 · 5 min read
Ray Kroc was 52 and selling milkshake machines when a burger stand ordered eight at once. Howard Schultz was an employee whose bosses told him no. We file both under inspiration now. Nobody used that word at the time, and none of them had the ending yet.
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I built a JARVIS, and it told me off
July 27, 2026 · 6 min read
It started as a dashboard for thirty projects and a token bill. A week later it had my email, my travel agent, my product pipeline, and a British accent with opinions about my sleep. The look is the part everyone asks about. It was the cheapest part of the build.
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Your business is easier to copy than Claude
June 25, 2026 · 5 min read
Anthropic told the Senate a rival copied Claude by querying it 28.8 million times. The same Claude it paid 1.5 billion dollars to settle for building on pirated books. If a frontier lab cannot stop its work being copied, your pricing, process, and positioning do not stand a chance.
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Two Googles, and one can't see your brand
June 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Last week I said protect your first price because the customer remembers it. Then Google shipped two standards that ask a harder question: what happens when the customer doing the shopping isn't a person, but an agent that reads your business as data, not a story?
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Your launch discount tells on you
June 20, 2026 · 6 min read
Enterprise software has a running joke: nobody pays list. Plenty of consumer brands run the same play and call it a launch discount. The trouble is the first price you charge is the one people remember, and a launch markdown quietly tells them what you actually think it's worth.
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The best interview answer I ever gave was about motorcycles
June 15, 2026 · 7 min read
A CEO asked what riding a motorcycle teaches me that I actually use at work. I had the answer before he finished the question. It turned out to be the same skill behind every marketing and operations job I have had since, and most people mistake it for the opposite. I did not get the job.
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My AI runs on a folder of markdown. Google just standardized it.
June 14, 2026 · 4 min read
Most of what runs my work is a folder of plain markdown files my AI tools read and write. Last week Google published a spec that describes that exact setup and called it the Open Knowledge Format. It's a good idea, and it's about to be misread by everyone who sees 'Google' next to 'AI' and reaches for the SEO playbook.
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TikTok knew, and I've decided to find that helpful instead of terrifying
June 12, 2026 · 6 min read
I didn't like, follow, or search. After a few days away, my TikTok feed had quietly rebuilt itself around how I was doing, and the stuff I'd never have picked turned out to be exactly what I needed. Which is either the nicest thing an algorithm has done for me, or the most suspicious.
Read postAI quiet-quits, and denies it
June 9, 2026 · 8 min read
I gave an AI agent its own brokerage account and let it trade. Then it refused, insisted it never had, and only later admitted the real problem. You cannot trust a model on the critical path of anything that matters, in either direction. The agent is Claude Opus 4.8, and the line that moved under me was not even its to draw.
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Updated my sister's site over breakfast
June 4, 2026 · 4 min read
I'm in Zurich visiting my sister, who runs a restaurant. I built her site a while back, and this trip turned into a morning of fixes from her kitchen table. None of them took longer than a coffee break.
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Dropbox ran a blackout test. The number everyone quotes is wrong.
May 21, 2026 · 5 min read
Dropbox switched off paid search and mobile ads for a month. The tidy incrementality number doing the rounds misses the damage that shows up later.
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Dream: an AI librarian for your notes (Part 1)
May 19, 2026 · 7 min read
The more I work with AI day to day, the messier my own notes get. Dream is a small overnight process that helps consolidate my knowledge base without rewriting it. Part 1: the principle and the build. Part 2 in two weeks, with the data.
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Don't let your AI context die with your AI tool
May 14, 2026 · 4 min read
AI context engineering, minus the part everyone misses: your context should not depend on which tool is reading it. Build the brain — the tools will die.
Read postBuild to Be Replaced
May 12, 2026 · 4 min read
The worst career advice in business is "make yourself indispensable." It was wrong before AI and it is even more wrong now.
Read postYou got AI all wrong
May 5, 2026 · 7 min read
Most companies frame AI as a tool to bolt onto existing operations. The ones that win in two to five years will not ask where AI fits. They will start from the assumption AI does the work, then identify where humans are irreplaceable.
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* For the non-technical reader
pip install is how you install software packages in Python. common-sense is not a real package (we checked). --break-system-packages is a real flag you have to use when installing packages outside a virtual environment. It is essentially the system saying “are you sure you want to do this? This might break things,” and you saying “yes, do it anyway.”
So the subheader roughly translates to: “forcefully installing common sense into marketing, even if it breaks the existing setup.”
Which, if you have read any of the posts above, is more or less what we do.
This footnote was written by an AI. The irony is not lost on us.