The Skills I Actually Kept: My Claude Code Skills, and What I Use vs Build
AI Coding

The Skills I Actually Kept: My Claude Code Skills, and What I Use vs Build

The Claude Code skills I actually kept — article drafting, a full deploy pipeline, design-system contracts, self-testing — and the one rule I use to decide when to reuse a pre-built skill versus write my own: who's going to maintain it in six months.

· 8 min read
UI Thrashing: The Reset Protocol That Actually Works
AI Coding

UI Thrashing: The Reset Protocol That Actually Works

When AI-driven UI coding turns into an endless loop of micro-tweaks, don't negotiate with the model — kill the session, max the thinking effort, resend everything, and let it plan without more questions.

· 2 min read
Claude Chat, Claude Co-Work, or Claude Code: How to Know Which One You Actually Need
AI Coding

Claude Chat, Claude Co-Work, or Claude Code: How to Know Which One You Actually Need

The three tiers of working with AI — Claude chat, Claude co-work, and Claude Code — and the exact signal that tells you when it's time to move up a level.

· 4 min read
One Button, No Subscription: How I Stopped Losing My Best Ideas
AI Coding

One Button, No Subscription: How I Stopped Losing My Best Ideas

A physical single-button voice recorder turns my runs, my commute, and my meetings into first drafts — no subscription, and a human review still gates everything before it ships.

· 2 min read
When GSD Became the Bottleneck, I Built Something Lighter
AI Coding

When GSD Became the Bottleneck, I Built Something Lighter

GSD asks a lot up front and forgets what it asked — great for serious multi-phase builds, terrible for rocket-ship mode. Here's the lightweight way of working I reach for instead: high effort, a two-item plan, round-based questions, big-bang execution, and two skills that auto-run the UAT.

· 3 min read
MCP, Skills, Commands, Agents: A Product Manager's No-BS Guide to AI Buzzwords
AI Coding

MCP, Skills, Commands, Agents: A Product Manager's No-BS Guide to AI Buzzwords

A product manager's plain-language explanation of MCP, Skills, Commands, and Agents — revisited with the repo habits that came out of actually living with them: a docs folder as memory, granular Skills over plugins, CLI over MCP where it counts, and picking a model per task.

· 9 min read
My AI Coding Stack: A Practical Guide to Using ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, and Lovable
AI Coding

My AI Coding Stack: A Practical Guide to Using ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, and Lovable

An evolving, practical AI coding stack — ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, and Lovable — updated with how I now default to the Claude Code CLI, route Opus, Sonnet, and GPT to different jobs, and why I dropped Fable.

· 8 min read
The Skill That Stops Claude From Forgetting Your Tasks
AI Coding

The Skill That Stops Claude From Forgetting Your Tasks

A new skill that turns a raw, unstructured brain-dump into a forced checklist of tasks for Claude — and makes it report back exactly what it did.

· 5 min read
Please Stop Comparing LLMs With One-Shot Prompts
AI Takes

Please Stop Comparing LLMs With One-Shot Prompts

One-shot prompt comparisons between LLMs are everywhere right now, and they're useless. The problem isn't the model — it's that nobody bothered to write a spec.

· 2 min read
Fable vs. Opus: My Token-Budget Verdict
AI Coding

Fable vs. Opus: My Token-Budget Verdict

I burned through two paid Max accounts in three days switching to Fable. Here's why I went back to Opus, and where Sonnet actually wins.

· 2 min read
Write Your Acceptance Criteria Before You Let AI Touch the Code
AI Coding

Write Your Acceptance Criteria Before You Let AI Touch the Code

A short AI-coding tip: write your acceptance criteria and tests during the plan, before any code gets written — so you never miss a requirement, and AI can test itself.

· 1 min read
Let AI Test Its Own Work: A UAT Loop With Claude Code and Playwright
AI Coding

Let AI Test Its Own Work: A UAT Loop With Claude Code and Playwright

The practice I use to have Claude Code test its own work with a UAT file, Playwright, and per-persona .env credentials — then ask it to fix what it finds and retest, almost on its own.

· 7 min read