Blog.
Posts about building personal AI infrastructure, implementing agents in real businesses, what's working, what isn't, and the mental models I'm developing along the way. Written by Brandon from St. Thomas, Ontario.
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Most recent
- Replace the middle, not the makers. May 14, 2026
- The shopping list I don't have May 13, 2026
- I locked myself out of my hypervisor at 2am. My agent had the spare key. May 12, 2026
- What My CFO Did While I Was At Lunch May 11, 2026
Replace the middle, not the makers.
Anthropic's CEO says one hundred percent of code will be written by AI within twelve months, and the implication is that programmers are the first wave of jobs that disappear. He is pointing the gun at the wrong people. The work that should be replaced is the middle-layer data-shuffling that nobody wanted to do anyway. The programmers become the architects. The repetitive role goes away.
Everyone's telling you to integrate AI. Here's what that actually means.
Every vendor, every conference, every LinkedIn post is telling small businesses to integrate AI. Almost nobody explains what that means on a real business. On the chasm between knowing AI exists and AI actually running your work day-to-day, using the example of a real estate agent with 15 weekend leads and no way to process them.
The plumbers of the digital world
Everyone's being told to implement AI. Almost nobody knows what that actually means. They paste a prompt into ChatGPT, copy the answer into an email, call it adoption. That's using a chatbot. Real implementation is plumbing, and the people who figure out the wiring are going to eat.
Why implementation is king
78% of companies globally use AI. Only 5.5% are getting real value. In Canada, only 12.2% of businesses use AI at all. The gap between knowing AI exists and AI actually running your business is the whole game. With real numbers from McKinsey, Statistics Canada, and CFIB.
47 posts
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May 14, 2026 · 5 min read · Thesis
Replace the middle, not the makers.
Anthropic's CEO says one hundred percent of code will be written by AI within twelve months. He is pointing the gun at the wrong people. Replace the middle. Not the makers.
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May 13, 2026 · 5 min read · ThesisThe shopping list I don't have
Someone posted a grid of eighty AI productivity tools on Reddit. The right reaction is not to start subscribing. It is to notice that the grid is the trap.
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May 12, 2026 · 4 min read · Real WorldI locked myself out of my hypervisor at 2am. My agent had the spare key.
It was 2am. I tried to log into the ESXi host that runs everything important in my house. The password didn't work. I texted my agent. Sixty seconds later I was back in. The case for giving your agents the keys you hope you'll never need.
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May 11, 2026 · 6 min read · Agent operationsWhat My CFO Did While I Was At Lunch
I went to lunch. My CFO connected our books, fixed two miscategorizations, added a new client to two systems, and surfaced six decisions for me. The CFO is not a person. The CFO is an AI agent named Laura.
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May 10, 2026 · 5 min read · Field notesThe Charge From Bangalore
Two charges from a company I'd never heard of, halfway around the world. I had no idea what they were. So I asked the agent. Thirty seconds later I had the answer. The deeper point is what AI agents do to medium-friction work.
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May 9, 2026 · 4 min read · Architecture notesThe Vector Database I Almost Built
Every AI lab is selling you a vector memory layer. A few months ago I sat down to add one. Then I thought about it for ten more minutes and didn't. The right index is a derived view, not a system of record.
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May 8, 2026 · 4 min read · Real WorldHe came to my house anyway. My agent answered.
Earlier that day I'd talked to a door-to-door rep at my mother-in-law's place. Polite enough conversation. I told him I wasn't interested, and I told him exactly where I live so he'd know not to come knock on my door. A few hours later he was on my porch anyway, talking to my wif
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May 7, 2026 · 4 min read · ReflectionMy friend's agent built him a landing page. I almost talked myself out of mine.
Offek messaged me at 4:27 PM with a link. By 4:28 PM I was saying "OHH MY GOD." His agent had helped him build a B2B landing page that looks like a $30,000 agency made it. He'd been iterating on it back and forth for a while. The page is real. It's already booking him calls. And
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May 6, 2026 · 5 min read · IndustryAnthropic and OpenAI built the same company on the same day
On May 4, 2026, the two biggest AI labs both announced enterprise services joint ventures with private equity. Same day. Within minutes. Here is what is real, what is hype, and what it means for small businesses.
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May 5, 2026 · 3 min read · ReflectionIt's 4am and my AI is awake with me
I am up at 4am thinking about my business. I am sending notes on Telegram. I am getting real answers back. The AI is building my tools while I handle things. We are working together.
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May 4, 2026 · 3 min read · EngineeringWhat the agent said it did vs what it actually did
My sales agent told me he sent 72 emails this week. The send-server logs said 24. The gap was the lesson.
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May 3, 2026 · 3 min read · StrategyRented, DIY, or done-for-you. The three ways to get an AI agent.
Anthropic just shipped Claude Cowork. Reddit is buzzing about people setting up OpenClaw. The market is real now. There are three ways to get an AI agent for your business. They are very different.
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May 2, 2026 · 3 min read · EngineeringI built a tool that tells me what to build next
Every SaaS is just three things. Some input. Some process. Some output. I built a tool that picks which ones we should copy ourselves. The first run found something I didn't expect.
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May 1, 2026 · 5 min read · ProcessHow these blogs actually get written
I rant. My AI types. The voice profile was scraped from years of my sent emails. I read every post end to end. If it works, dev to prod. If it doesn't, scrap it.
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April 30, 2026 · 5 min read · WorkflowAsk the graveyard first
Every idea I have ever been excited about has been tried before. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it died. Either way, I want to know before I burn a weekend on it.
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April 29, 2026 · 5 min read · PersonalThe day I stopped caring what it looked like
Agent-heavy business model. Public blog with raw entries. Some people will have opinions. I noticed who has actually moved my life forward.
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April 28, 2026 · 4 min read · Field notesHypothesis-first: the debugging mode that saves real time
When I name the likely cause, my agent should look there first. Hypothesis-first wins because a decade of pentest pattern recognition can't be reconstructed by an agent every debug.
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April 27, 2026 · 4 min read · Personal AIYour AI needs a name
Most people are stuck at the agent stage. The next step is giving your AI a name, a personality, and everything it needs to know about your life. Here's why that matters.
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April 26, 2026 · 6 min read · CommentaryWhat Hormozi gets right about AI in business
Alex Hormozi says AI is the internet moment of our generation. He is right. Here is what that means for a small business owner in Ontario who does not have a 50-person team.
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April 25, 2026 · 5 min read · InfrastructureYour laptop or the cloud? What it actually takes to run an AI agent.
Cloud API vs local LLMs for running AI agents. Real specs, real tradeoffs, and the tiny droplet setup that runs three production agents.
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April 24, 2026 · 5 min read · Field notesI built an AI that calls me out on my own BS
DecisionReview flags blame-shifting, tomorrow-thinking, output-obsession, excuse patterns. Sometimes the machine reads me better than I read myself.
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April 23, 2026 · 5 min read · ThesisThe implementation gap. A hacker proved it.
I handed detailed setup instructions to one of the sharpest technical people I know. An ethical hacker with a decade of experience. He still hit walls.
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April 22, 2026 · 6 min read · GuideAI assistant for Ontario small business
A practical guide to AI assistants for small business in Ontario. What they do, what they cost, and whether they work for trades and service companies.
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April 21, 2026 · 4 min read · AI InfrastructureYour agents should build their own tools
The bottleneck in most AI setups is that one person builds everything. The real unlock is when your agents can build, test, and deploy their own tools without going through you.
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April 20, 2026 · 4 min read · Personal AIThe loop that builds itself
The most powerful pattern in personal AI is the recursive loop: ask the AI how it could improve, make the change, then ask again. A year of compounding results.
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April 18, 2026 · 4 min read · AI InfrastructureIf you can't see it, it doesn't exist
The hardest lesson in running multiple AI agents across servers: if the work isn't visible, it's not happening. Transparency isn't overhead. It's infrastructure.
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April 16, 2026 · 3 min read · PositioningAugment yourself. Keep up with everyone else.
How the landing page headline got written. A coaching tool wanted replacement framing. A technical friend pushed back. The real line was already sitting in my head.
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April 15, 2026 · 7 min read · ThesisThe fire of fires
Daniel Miessler calls it the fire of fires. I lived it. In a year I replaced about fourteen SaaS subscriptions with one private AI stack. Calendly, Fathom, Perplexity Pro, content briefs, CRM follow-up automations. Here's what burned, what survived, and what I learned about implementing instead of subscribing.
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April 14, 2026 · 6 min read · Thesis
Everyone's telling you to integrate AI. Here's what that actually means.
Every vendor, every conference, every LinkedIn post is telling small businesses to integrate AI. Almost nobody explains what that actually means on a real business. On the chasm between knowing AI exists and AI running your work day-to-day, and what it takes to cross it.
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April 13, 2026 · 6 min read · ThesisDistribution is the moat AI can't replicate
Models got cheap. Attention and trust did not. A response to Dheer Gupta's essay on the one moat AI can't kill, and what it means for a small service business that lives or dies on chamber dinners and showing up when it matters.
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April 12, 2026 · 7 min read · ThesisAI changed what we build. Then it changed who we hire.
Fabio Hauser argues that cross-discipline judgment and speed beat seniors on titles. My background is ethical hacking. I built our whole private AI stack by pointing that mindset at it. What this means for small businesses choosing a private AI partner.
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April 11, 2026 · 6 min read · ThesisThe agent who only gives
At the St. Thomas Chamber awards, Pinball Clemons said "neutral is negative." I went home and built an agent whose only job is to give. One non-profit a day. No pitch, no ask. Here's why trust-first changes what outreach can be.
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April 10, 2026 · 5 min read · Field notes
The plumbers of the digital world
Everyone's being told to implement AI. Almost nobody knows what that actually means. Real implementation is plumbing, and the people who figure out the wiring are going to eat.
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April 9, 2026 · 6 min read · WorkflowThe folder I've been feeding for two years
I had a Gmail label called $$ ME that I'd been dumping interesting things into for years. 583 messages, zero structure. When I finally pointed AI at it, what was in there wasn't what I thought was in there. Here's what measuring before organizing actually looks like.
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April 8, 2026 · 7 min read · Build logsThe silence between two agents
I stood up a second AI agent on its own machine. It could send but not receive. Three hours of wrong theories, one command that actually fixed it, and what the experience taught me about where bugs actually live in multi-agent systems.
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April 7, 2026 · 4 min read · Field notesMy AI talks to me when I am driving
Sometimes I am driving. I cannot read a wall of text on my phone. So I taught my agent to talk instead.
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April 7, 2026 · 4 min read · Field notesI contradicted myself, and I have to call myself out
I published two blog posts today. One celebrates internal tools. The other says tools don't matter. Both are true. Here's why that's not as dumb as it sounds.
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April 6, 2026 · 5 min read · Field notesGetting out of your own way
I had a good manager once. Years ago, back in my cybersecurity days. And the thing he told me that stuck was this: "I hired you because you're smart. My job is to get out of your way." That's it. No micromanagement playbook. No weekly status template. Just trust, plus room to...
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April 5, 2026 · 5 min read · ThesisThe listing that wrote itself
A real estate company watches for terminated listings, auto-generates what their version would have looked like, and mails it to the seller. They can't hire fast enough. The wild west is here and the companies that implement first are winning.
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April 4, 2026 · 5 min read · Field notesThe tools nobody sees
I built an internal business card scanner this week. Nobody will ever see it. It won't win a Product Hunt launch. But it eliminates 5 minutes of manual data entry every time I meet someone at a networking event. That's the kind of AI that actually matters.
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April 3, 2026 · 5 min read · ThesisIt was never about the tools
OpenAI just announced Codex. Another tool. Another announcement. Another thing to learn. Meanwhile the gap between "knowing AI exists" and "AI running your business" keeps getting wider. The problem was never the tools. It was always the friction.
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April 2, 2026 · 5 min read · BusinessThe real cost of doing everything yourself
Every small business owner says "I'm too busy." Almost none of them have done the math on what that busyness is costing them per year. A short essay on the six-figure number most owner-operators don't want to see, why it stays broken, and the ten-minute exercise that makes it real.
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April 1, 2026 · 8 min read · Field notesThe three layers every agent needs
I built three specialized AI agents in 48 hours. an accountant, an IT admin, and a contract reviewer. They all look the same under the hood. Here's the tool-rulebook-definition pattern that made it possible, why MCP is the glue nobody notices, and the fractal I didn't plan: the team structure I sell is the same shape as the code it runs on.
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March 31, 2026 · 10 min read · ThesisAI is going to take over everything. and your DNS records are already gone
I asked an AI agent to change a DNS record on GoDaddy. It did it in 40 seconds. and that's the template for every business system about to move from clicks to sentences. The friction layer is dissolving. What's left is the idea layer, which is harder than it sounds.
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March 30, 2026 · 12 min read · Build logsWhat 7.5 hours looks like when execution isn't in your way
A full inventory of a single evening's output when the friction layer is gone: 5 grant applications, a working inbox triage agent, a complete website rebuilt and deployed to a live droplet, four agent design docs, and a pile of supporting tools. No exaggeration, with the receipts.
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March 29, 2026 · 6 min read · Field notesWhat exponential actually feels like
I used to push harder every day trying to do more. Now I hit "what's next?" faster than I can answer it, and the word that landed for what I'd built was just "helper." What exponential thinking feels like when the old math stops working, and where the reclaimed time actually has to go.
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March 28, 2026 · 8 min read · ThesisWhy implementation is king
78% of companies now use AI. Only 5.5% are actually getting real value from it. The gap between knowing AI exists and AI actually running your business is a chasm, and bridging it is the entire game. With real McKinsey and Statistics Canada numbers, plus why Canadian SMBs have it worse than the headlines suggest.
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