Product, He Built

Essays on product, AI, leadership, and building. Long-form, hands-on, and occasionally about what broke.

Career

Applying for jobs is like stand-up comedy

A lot of the standard job search advice is bunk, and the rest is easier to follow if you treat the whole thing like an open mic. Go up rusty, test your material, learn to handle hecklers.

Leadership

Everyone can build now. The fundamentals shouldn't change.

AI made everyone a builder. It didn't say who orchestrates them, or who validates and integrates all the prototypes.

Building with AI

You should have a website. And you can build it in an hour with Claude.

An old colleague got laid off, shipped a personal site ten days after I sent him a starter kit, and took back his story online. So I turned the starter into a free plugin.

Building with AI

AI is researching you. Make sure it gets your story right.

ChatGPT showed up in my site's referrer logs. Companies are worrying about how they appear in AI search. The same logic applies to many of us.

Building with AI

How to Digitally Detox Right Now (Even If You're Job Searching)

I check my inbox twice a day. Here's what a morning briefing from my AI assistant gave me back in a brutal job market.

Building with AI

Need an AI recruiter that works for you? Try this one.

Open-sourced a Claude Code plugin that turns Claude into your job search assistant. The accessible version of the system I built for myself, free on GitHub.

Building with AI

I build web apps from my phone. Here's the whole setup.

No code, no IDE, just a Telegram message. A Mac at home runs Claude Code, and a free guide gets you the same setup.

Building with AI

We're not building great AI tools for non-technical audiences (yet)

I built a job scanner that runs while I sleep. I couldn't hand it to a smart, motivated friend. The gap between 'I want that' and 'I can do that' is still enormous.

Building with AI

What Running an AI Job Scanner Daily Actually Looks Like

Two weeks running my AI job scanner. The field report: extraction failures, a temporary block, duplicate noise, and what actually held up.

Building with AI

I Paid to Scrub My Data From Hundreds of Data Brokers. Then I Sent Even More to an AI.

I pay a service to scrub my data from hundreds of brokers. Then I hand an AI my taxes, my finances, my fears. Where should that personal context actually live?

Building with AI

I Built an AI Job Search Assistant That Texts Me When It Finds Roles I Should Apply To

How a Mac Mini in my apartment scans LinkedIn twice a day, filters for roles that match my profile, and texts me the results, for about six cents a day.