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I keep hitting the same wall, and I think I have been solving it backwards.

When I work with an AI assistant on anything that lasts longer than an afternoon, the conversation gets long, and somewhere in that length it stops being useful. It forgets what we settled on Tuesday. I end up being the memory. I re-explain the same context over and over, and after a while the re-explaining is most of the work.

The obvious fix is to give it a better memory. I am starting to think that is the wrong fix.

What I keep sketching instead is not one assistant with a longer attention span. It is several, each with a smaller job, and some shape between them. One that only holds the plan and never does the work. One that owns a single area and knows that area properly. One that gets a single task, does it, says what happened, and goes away.

That last one is the part I find most interesting, because it is disposable on purpose. It does not need to remember anything. It needs to be told enough.

The appeal is not that this is more...

Well, hello again. It's been a minute since I wrote anything here that wasn't about Cursor, Claude, or some shiny new coding agent. But I'd rather build things than write about building things, so it takes an actual story to drag me back here, and this time I've got one. This time I pointed the AI tooling I usually write about at something of my own and shipped a real product with it.

The short version: I got annoyed. The longer version is about marketplace fees, 20+ years of building software, and a question I can't stop chewing on about which other industries might be sitting ducks as software development keeps changing.

The marketplace fee that broke me

My fiancée runs a small wellness practice, and like most practices, we used a booking platform to handle scheduling and payments. We started out on a service called MassageBook, which is a dominant player in the massage niche and, to be fair, does a LOT right.

But the model has a catch I couldn't unsee once I saw it: the marketplace. Your booking page lives inside theirdirectory, alongside every other therapist in your zip code. When a...

Things are evolving so quickly in the world of AI-assisted development, it's difficult to keep up at times.

For example: Codex, from OpenAI, is a coding agent designed to deeply understand your codebase and follow project-specific instructions using natural language. It works especially well when guided by AGENTS.md files in your repository (more on that below).

Codex was released last week. This week, GitHub announced major updates to Copilot with the introduction of Copilot Workspace, which takes assigned Github issues, spins up a development sandbox, and submits a PR with its results - almost like pairing with an AI engineer who knows your repo. I think this one has a good chance of massive adoption since it's already built into Github, where developers already live.

Visual Studio Code also announced that they’re becoming an open source AI IDE. They also now have "Agent Mode". That move feels like a direct response to Cursor, which has quickly gained traction by being AI-native from the start (and is a fork of VSC).

And just today, OpenAI announced the acquisition of LoveFrom.ai, Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup. The goal? Build consumer AI devices that...

I’ve been coding with AI for a while now, using it across a variety of projects.

Lately, there’s been a lot of noise around the idea of “vibe coding.” You’ve probably seen the posts:

I vibe-coded this app over the weekend… developers are cooked!

It’s the kind of hype cycle we see every time a shiny new tool or paradigm shows up in tech. And to be fair, AI really can accelerate development in ways that feel borderline magical. It’s a thrilling moment to be part of.

But let’s be clear: most of what people are showing off right now are demos, prototypes, or MVPs. AI agents today aren’t building complete businesses, shipping full platforms, or replacing developers. Yet.

As things are today, vibe coding works great in the early phases of a project, when speed and experimentation matter most. But building a reliable, secure, scalable service still requires humans who know how the pieces fit together. Trying to vibe code your way through a serious product is a fast track to technical debt and integration headaches.

This reminds me a lot of the no-code movement. No-code tools make you feel incredibly...

I’ve been fascinated by AI-assisted development and the accelerating shift in how software gets built. Tools like Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude have become staples in my daily developer toolkit. But beyond these, I’ve been exploring a new wave of AI tools designed specifically for building websites and applications - tools that attempt to take entire chunks of the development process off your plate.

Here are two I’ve tested recently that are worth a closer look.

v0 by Vercel

v0 is an AI UI generator by Vercel that turns plain text prompts into working interfaces. It works well alongside frameworks like Next.js, TailwindCSS, and shadcn/ui, which I selected as the tech stack for my project.

I’d been hearing about v0’s capabilities in creating user interfaces, so I was glad for a chance to take it for a spin. I used it to design and create the UI for Pooped Puppies, a puppy training school website.

To set the project up for success, I wrote a thorough project document. One thing I’m finding when working with AI agents: the more detailed your instructions, the better the outcome - much like managing a junior developer...