AI

After 18 months without a full-time gig, I stopped treating the standard HR application as my main route to work and started contacting decision makers directly.

At 66, hiring filters rejected me in hours and never saw a person. I am not bitter about it. The same tools that score us out multiplied the range of problems I can solve, and that is worth more than any job I applied for.

My agent is my user interface. If your product wants my business, give my agent an API it can read and use in the next five minutes. Keep the screens.

I asked Google Gemini whether my small-business website was ready for AI agents. It said textbook example. That verdict took months of invisible work, and you can run the same test tonight.

Apply AI to a part of your business that was never limiting results and that part really does improve. Your costs go up, your sales do not. Here is what a constraint is, why almost no AI investment is aimed at one, and how to tell whether yours is.

I moved the judgment and writing work in my daily report from cloud models to a local Qwen model. It costs less and keeps more of my data at home.

Goldratt's Evaporating Cloud method, scaled with AI assistance.

We sell an audit that tells businesses what machines can read on their site. Then I looked at our own server logs and found the machines had been talking to us for months, and we had never once answered.

For the past couple of weeks I have done real coding on a model running entirely on my own GPUs. Here is the hardware, the model, and what every parameter actually does.

At Andrews-Cooper, the most important part of the Defibrio work was the protocol boundary. The host CLI, the firmware, the cellphone UI, and the product itself were organized around it.

When an AI participates in a problem-solving conversation, people drop defenses they have carried for decades. This is not about a better search engine. It is about changing the dynamics of the room.

Becoming my own registered agent and using Claude Code to manage the paperwork saved money, but the real win is owning my business records in a system I control and can search.

I built an AI agent that applies TOC Thinking Processes autonomously to improve business ideas. When I pointed it at itself, it resolved two real tensions via Evaporating Cloud across 10 iterations.

Twelve people walk into a working group carrying separate problems and walk out carrying a shared one. Episode 05 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.

A board commissioner and an AI sit alone in an empty conference room and talk honestly about what just happened and why. Episode 06 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.

How I used Claude Code to turn a confusing insurance denial into a clear, organized answer -- and why I'm building an AI-managed insurance filing system for everything.

Replacing a $150/month accounting platform with open-source tools and AI revealed something bigger: the build-vs-buy calculus has shifted, and most of us have not caught up.

A hospital CFO runs the same numbers two ways and gets answers that disagree by a factor of five. Episode 04 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.

A Chief Nursing Officer processes what happened at the board meeting -- and discovers that the structural conflicts she has been managing for years have a name. Episode 02 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.

A dramatized community hospital board meeting — fictional health system, real governance dynamics — showing what changes when an AI has a seat at the table.

A working workflow for small business owners who know they should be posting online but never get around to it.

Why good people in well-run hospitals still end up in the wrong conversation, and what a structural fix might look like.

How connecting your Google Business Profile to your website structured data helps both AI search engines and traditional search understand who you actually are.

A small business owner's account of running a complete SEO audit with an AI coding agent in one session, fixing every issue the same afternoon, and what it means for the $80 billion SEO industry.

A small business owner's account of automating tax preparation with AI coding agents, and what it suggests about the near future of knowledge work.

When you can build a custom import tool in fifteen minutes, the calculus on which subscriptions to keep changes dramatically.

Matt Shumer is right that AI is about to change everything. But the real transformation isn't about job loss -- it's about discovering that most of the limits you've been working within were never real.