Posts
Field notes. Older writing on search, trust and the web, and newer notes on research and tools. Single ideas and partial updates; the research pages hold the complete ones.
- Jacquard: raising an explainer agent in a day
One day with Claude, building an agent that draws explainer figures for my posts. Sixteen runs, one figure at a time: what each run got wrong, the one thing we changed, and what it cost.
- prose-scrub 0.4: a small model as the second reader
Day two of prose-scrub. A bet about headings that I lost, a judge command that asks Claude Haiku five times and averages, a score field the model filled with sentences, and a test on my own posts where the gate made one of them worse.
- prose-scrub: a slop gate, built by the agent it gates
A command-line gate that fails prose on AI writing tells, built in one evening with Claude, which loosened a rule to pass its own README within seconds of its first scan. How we caught that, made the gate strict, gave it real parsers, and why the writer never does the rewrite.
- How and Why to get involved with Vibe Manufacturing
If AI makes designing physical things cheap, what should a person with software skills and no factory do? A short, hedged reading of the research: why to try, how to start small, what to avoid, and what would change the answer.
- Generative OG images, built and measured
A topographic map for every page, drawn from its text and edit date. How we built generative OG images in one session, what we measured along the way, what went wrong, and the full source.
- Where Small Business Owners Hang Out Online
The 34.8 million small business owners in the US spend their online time differently than everyone else. Here's where they actually are, why they're there, and what it means if you're trying to reach them.
- Google E-E-A-T: What It Means for Your Website
Google doesn't rank websites. It ranks trust. Here's the framework it uses to decide whether your site deserves traffic - and what that means if you run a local business.
- Why Satisfying E-E-A-T Requires a Custom Website
Templates can't demonstrate experience. Page builders can't communicate expertise. If Google's quality framework matters to your business, your website needs to be built - not assembled.