Chinese New Year dinner, Szechuan Gourmet, Midtown Manhattan. This place has been Michelin-recommended multiple times. It’s one of the most acclaimed Szechuan restaurants in the city — the kind of place where the ma la hits right and the menu runs deep into dishes most Americans have never encountered. Two tables nearby, both ordering fried rice and General Tso’s chicken. My wife nudged me mid-conversation and nodded in their direction. Same order, same restaurant, same story. One of the best Szechuan restaurants in New York, Lunar New Year, and the tables next to us are ordering a dish that doesn’t exist in China. ...

Franz Kafka spent his days inside the system we now use his name to describe. By day, he worked at a workers’ accident insurance institute, reading claims and investigating workplace incidents.1 By night, he wrote stories where rules are everywhere, reasons are nowhere, and the process becomes the punishment. Kafka wasn’t imagining a dystopia. He was taking minutes. ...

Last week, I felt validated and threatened in the same moment. I’d spent December and January writing about context engineering. How to unlock data for AI. How to own your context locally. Why the intelligence layer matters less than the context layer. I built an iOS app. I migrated my entire workflow. I wrote about both. Then Anthropic shipped everything I’d been building. In the same week. This isn’t a complaint. It’s a reckoning. Being right about the future doesn’t protect you from it. ...

Last Tuesday, I opened Claude Desktop to continue a complex workflow I’d been refining for months. Instead, I found a login screen. Then an error. Then, after a frustrating back-and-forth, confirmation: my account had been reset. Six months of Claude — gone. Not just chat history. My account memory, where Claude had learned that I prefer direct feedback over diplomatic hedging. My project memories, where “Phoenix” meant my project, not a city in Arizona. The custom Skills I’d built for everything from weekly status reports to technical spec reviews. ...

I had a working Python MCP server with 24 tools for accessing Fannie Mae mortgage data. I wanted to deploy it remotely so Claude could access it from anywhere—not just my local machine. Cloudflare Workers seemed perfect. They’d just announced Python support. Easy, right? It wasn’t. The Python Attempt My server used httpx for API calls and the mcp SDK with FastMCP. Standard stuff: @mcp.tool() async def get_loan_limits_by_location(state: str, county: str) -> dict: return await client.make_request(f"/v1/loan-limits/state/{state}/county/{county}") I configured wrangler.jsonc for Python Workers, ran pywrangler deploy, and… the health check worked! ...

The Three Friends In the past year, I’ve helped advised three friends build their GP tech stacks from scratch. Maybe it’s my network. Or maybe AI is democratizing operational knowledge in real time. The data suggests the latter: small businesses closed a technology gap with enterprises in 18 months that previously took decades. In February 2024, large businesses used AI at 1.8x the rate of small businesses. By August 2025, that gap had nearly vanished.1 ...

The Three-Hour Clone In March 2025, Manus AI launched with a demo video that racked up 200,000 views in 24 hours. Within a week, two million people had joined the waitlist. Invitation codes were reselling for up to $13,500. Jack Dorsey called it “excellent.” Economists were declaring it “ahead of its American counterparts.” Eight months later, the company announced it had hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue—the fastest journey from zero to $100M ARR in startup history. ...

The Paradox I just shipped an iOS app. It helps runners get AI-powered analysis of their workouts and generate shareable art from their stats. But the app itself has no AI. No GPT integration. No on-device model. No API calls to Claude or Gemini. Zero intelligence inside. And that’s exactly why it works. The Backstory Last month, I replaced $200/year in fitness subscriptions with a weekend project — an AI system that gave me personalized coaching by connecting Claude to my running database. (That story here.) ...

The Problem You have data. Lots of it. Your team captures everything—sales metrics, customer interactions, product analytics, support tickets. But when someone asks a simple question like “Are we improving?” you’re stuck either: Clicking through five dashboards and manually connecting dots, or Paying for specialized tools that lock you into their workflows Sound familiar? I hit this wall with my running data. I was paying $200/year for Strava and Runna (coaching app) but still couldn’t get straight answers to questions like: ...

On October 16, 2025, while the tech world was still digesting OpenAI’s Instant Checkout within ChatGPT, Anthropic quietly released something called “Skills.” No flashy demos. No performance charts comparing against GPT-5. Just a simple announcement about folders containing Markdown files and optional scripts. Within hours, Simon Willison—one of the most productive voices in AI development—called it “maybe a bigger deal than MCP.” Here’s what makes this strange: Claude has only 5% of ChatGPT’s user base. But it generates 40% of OpenAI’s revenue. ...