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Notes from the studio.

Building in public: what I'm making, what broke, and what I'd do differently.

Grok Bot, and the question every small business now has to answer

xAI shipped agents that get their own cloud computer and sign into your tools like you do. My feed called it god mode. The interesting part is not the army of bots. It is that renting one and owning one are different bets, and most businesses only need one of them. →

Setting up an AI agent for a realtor who was out of hours

A realtor I work with was never short on leads. She was short on hours. Instead of another dashboard, she got an agent harness: a folder of files on her own Mac that reads everything, drafts carefully, and publishes nothing. →

Most of my AI bill was re-reading my own transcript

My usage dashboard blamed subagents and had a fix ready. Twenty minutes of tallying the raw transcripts said the opposite: the ten most expensive sessions of the week spawned no agents at all, and almost every token I paid for was the same conversation being read again. →

The SEO skill that has to show its receipts

Most SEO advice written for AI agents is a checklist, which is how you get a confident audit of a site nobody looked at. So the studio built one that cannot make a claim without a fetched artifact behind it, then pointed it at five sites in a day. →

The harness reads my texts now

I text myself X posts about agent workflows and never read them twice. So the studio harness got read-only access to the thread, and the pile became three shipped upgrades: a blind duel for risky answers, a knowledge graph under the assistant, and a rulebook half its old weight. →

Building a real estate site for a realtor in The Dalles

Grace Tarnasky messaged me on a Thursday and had a working site on Saturday. A walkthrough and a look at the decisions: why her listings are real pages instead of an IDX iframe, why six neighbourhood guides matter more than a search box, and what a fork of an engine buys you. →

How a real estate agent gets recommended by an AI assistant

Buyers have started asking ChatGPT to recommend an agent. That answer is assembled from sources a machine can verify, which is a different game from ranking, and a more winnable one. →

Why your therapy practice does not show up on Google

I ran a private practice and built the directory 16,800 Oregon providers sit in. Here is the honest reason most counseling websites are invisible, and the order I would fix it in. →

The questions similarity search can't answer

The assistant on this site can find anything that resembles your question. It cannot yet follow a chain of facts spread across three notes. Why that failure is structural, what a knowledge graph actually is, and how I plan to wire one into the studio's retrieval without tearing out what works. →

Scroll-scrubbed video, the cheapest premium feel on the web

I taught the studio toolchain the Apple-style scroll-scrub technique, then built eight live demos from five-second phone clips to prove it. What makes a scrubbed page feel premium, the plumbing nobody mentions, and where the technique actually earns its keep. →

AI slop, and the files that keep it out of my projects

Every AI project drifts toward the same fonts, the same gradients, the same sentences. Mine do not, because every agent I run inherits a small set of law files. Here is the whole playbook, structure and all. →

The agency that never sleeps: running a business on AI loops

Loop engineering is taught for building software. The bigger idea is using the same loop to run the business: point an agent at a number, give it a scoreboard it can check itself, and let it improve your SEO, ads, and AI visibility for months while you sleep. →

Real estate runs on too many dashboards

Every realtor I've worked with pays for five systems that don't talk to each other. The fix isn't another integration. It's one system that owns the whole flow, from listing to lead to closed. →

The baton passes

Why a new software studio in Eugene, Oregon is named after a man who spent forty years moving packets. →

Learning to scale SEO and build organic traffic

Top-3 rankings for the searches that matter didn't come from tricks. They came from structure, patience, and publishing things worth finding. Here's the playbook I had to learn the slow way. →

Building trust with thousands of providers in Oregon

A directory is easy. Sixteen thousand indexed providers is a spreadsheet. The hard part, and the real product, is trust, and it gets built one conversation at a time. →