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Going beyond the chat
Practical AI agents for business workflows
Replace the repeatable parts of your work with an agent workflow while keeping judgment, accountability, and consequential actions in human hands.
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Open, closed, local, and hosted
How to choose an AI stack
Separate model, provider, product, and harness, then choose among closed APIs, open weights, and local inference for the work you actually have.
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From one agent to autonomous systems
Computer use, sandboxes, subagents, evals, and permissions can extend an agent's reach. They also create new ways to fail.
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Anatomy of an AI agent
Models do not become agents by declaration. An agent needs a loop, tools, instructions, state, permissions, and software to hold it together.
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How AI finds information, reasons, and changes behavior
Retrieval, embeddings, fine-tuning, reasoning, and reinforcement learning solve different problems. Here is how to tell them apart.
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What actually happens when you chat with AI
Follow one message through prompts, context, files, memory, tools, and output, then put that knowledge to work with better prompting.
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How AI models work without the math
A practical explanation of AI, language models, tokens, training, and inference without pretending the model is the whole product.
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Everything you need to know about AI
To sound like you know what you're talking about
A plain-English glossary for understanding AI, agents, skills, harnesses, frontier models, and the rest of the vocabulary people keep throwing around.
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Are my skills making Claude dumber?
More instruction is not always more intelligence. Sometimes it is just a more expensive way to make a smart agent act dumb.
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Good leaders lead from the front
It sounds too obvious to say. But leaders need to hear it. Especially startup founders. Your startup isn't going anywhere without strong, visible leadership.
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Agentic worktree management
One of the hardest parts of my job is context switching. I frequently have several tasks going on at once - reviewing code submitted by other engineers (or more accurately,...
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Back at it
After a long hiatus, I’m back at it. I’ve been working on a few side projects, but I’m ready to get back to writing and building.
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Link: Clark Moody's dashboard
bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard
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Pronounceable password generator
A much-needed, cleaner update to ye olde Pronounceable Password Generator
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Value for value
Two things I detest about the web are ads and sponsors. I spend an inordinate amount of time blocking ads. I have DNS rules, ad blocking extensions, VPN, etc.
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How to find the perfect domain
How to choose the perfect domain for your SaaS product when all the best domains are taken.
Are all the good domains taken? How can you come up with a good brand and a decent domain in 2022?
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How to find a technical cofounder (and should you?)
Finding and hiring the right people is one of the most challenging parts of any business.
If you’re not a developer, this can seem like a great big stop sign. How on earth will you get your project built if you don’t have the skills and...
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Why we stopped tracking our time
We make it work by caring more about quality of work than about quantity of hours.
Time tracking is one of the hallmark features of design and development agencies. But we dropped it entirely. How do we function without tracking our time?
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How to make software like Pablo Picasso
Who would have thought that a cubist's minimalism could teach us something about software design.
The question that the Critical Path designer asks is not “how much can we fit in to the first version and still hit our deadline”; it's “how little can we...
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Don't hide in the garage while you build your product
A prototype is not the same as an MVP (and why you shouldn't hide in your garage while building it)
MVPs have gotten a lot of hate lately. But that's because there's some confusion about the difference between an MVP and a prototype.
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How to use your MVP to raise seed funding
You've got your MVP, traction, and revenue. Where can you look to raise funding for growth?
I really liked this question that came through Quora recently:
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How to manage a successful lean MVP project
How Agile methodologies can help make your MVP a success
How to Successfully Manage an MVP Project Using Agile Principles
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How to create your MVP
Launching an MVP is about the process, not the product.
What exactly is an MVP? The answer is: it depends. It depends on the stage of your business, and where you are with your product.
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Automated inbox organization with + addresses
Dig yourself out from under your inbox overload with the "+" trick
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How to find product-market fit before your product exists
Product validation is not a one-time event. Instead it’s a stair-step. It’s important to stop and test product-market fit at every stage as you develop your business. But that validation looks different at each stage.
How can you find product-market fit before your product exists?
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The three questions every successful product must answer
If all you do is build it, I guarantee they will not come
If you build it they will come. This doesn’t happen in real life: if all you do is build it, I guarantee they will not come. Sorry to be the bearer...
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The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer
Don't make the mistake of confusing the activities of business with its purpose.
One of my all-time favorite business quotes is from the sagacious Peter F. Drucker, who famously said:
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Why asking "why" can lead to better answers
Why the "5 Whys" technique is recognized as one of the most effective ways to address root cause issues.
Have you ever been annoyed at a three-year-old asking the dreaded incessant “why why why”?
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George Nakashima: "it requires a genuine fight to produce one well designed object of relatively permanent value"
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Distractions
Maybe it’s not coincidence - I’ve read two articles this morning about dealing with distractions: Worrying by Garret Dimon, and Good and Bad Procrastination an oldie but goodie by Paul Graham.
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Pronounceable password generator
Here’s a neat little snippet of Ruby code for generating pronounceable passwords.