HOW I ACTUALLY DID IT
Build logs, product takes, and occasional improv tangents. The messy middle left in.
Treat Your Product Experiments Like a Lab Notebook
A product framework borrowed from AI coding agents: one change at a time, write down the failures, don't trust the first metric, keep a record.
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Choosing My AI Crew
Hermes has a Mixture of Agents feature — a few models draft, one model edits. Fugu is a great AI crew, but it's one you rent at frontier prices. Why rent a crew when I can hire my own from free and local models? So I did.
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I tested a fancier AI model on product work
Sakana's new Fugu model is a crew of sub-agents in a trench coat — a router that fans your request out to a little team and assembles the answer. I ran it through the same three product tasks as my cheap open-weight models. It scored a 96. It also cost about twenty times more.
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I tested open-weight AI models on real product work
I built a tiny benchmark of three real PM tasks and ran cheap cloud models plus a local one against it. The whole cloud run cost eleven cents. The surprise wasn't whether they could write — it was whether they'd admit when the answer wasn't there.
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Model Agnostic, on Purpose
A model you depend on can vanish overnight — a government order, a price hike, a deprecation. Here's how I build so no single model is load-bearing: test against your own work, keep a bench not a bet.
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The Last 10%
The work is fast. The gap is slow. Why the last 10% of every project takes weeks — and the one change that fixes it.
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How to Build Your Own Health Agent
Three nutrition and health agents, one for each family member — what an agent actually is, and how to run one in the cloud or fully local.
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My Build, Buy, or Skip Rules for MCPs
Build, buy, or skip — the four questions I ask before wiring up another MCP bridge
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Skip the subscription and build a TTS pipeline
I have subscriptions to various online journals. I mean what isn’t a subscription these days. I often save articles I want to keep or use for writing…
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I ran my first LoRA experiment and made the AI stupid
I fine-tuned a 1.5B model to replace gemma 27b on one narrow task. Training loss looked great. Eval told a different story.
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A beginner's guide to building a weekly digest
I built my kid a weekly personalized philosophy digest because he asked. Here's the template you can fork to build your own.
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I Don't Need Meal Planning, I Just Need Help
Why building a meal planner was the wrong fix — and what I built instead.
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Two Claudes, one Slack channel
How I stopped two Claudes from drifting out of sync using a single Slack channel.
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Bot Fraud, Manual Detection, and Why the System Worked (This Time)
A fraud wave, a paranoid Sunday, and why manual detection isn't a system
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I counted my MCP tools and, well, yikes
150 MCP tools were silently eating half my context window — an audit, a cull, and two custom servers later
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My AI handles ops so I don't have to
Why I built a nightly ops agent instead of a self-reflection loop
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Playing games
I built a pixel art game to celebrate my team. Here's why.
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Your AI skills are rotting, let's fix that
You collect skills but are you using them? Let's find out.
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Stop Letting Your AI Coding Sessions Die
A simple habit to stop losing context between AI coding sessions
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Why Yes, I A/B Tested AI Agent Frameworks
What running two AI agent frameworks taught me about architecture
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Skills > Dashboards
When the obvious path is blocked, product thinking finds the side door.
Read →Warp Is Good. I Turned Off All the AI Features. Still Good.
A product person's take on Warp terminal — no AI required
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I asked an AI to describe how our company actually works
What a year of meeting transcripts revealed about how decisions really get made
Read →Your meeting transcripts don't need to leave your laptop
Transcription meets privacy
Read →Take your product and... sunset it
What it actually costs to kill a product your team built
Read →Automating my writing pipeline
I built a content pipeline that mines 41 weekly meeting transcripts for stories worth telling
Read →AI made building easier, but engineering harder
AI lowered the barrier to attempt technical work — but doing anything real pushed me deeper into engineering, not away from it.
Read →I Built a Lead Generation Solution with GitHub Actions
How I shipped a zero-infrastructure GitHub Actions pipeline to pull trial-usage data from six global regions into the hands of our sales, marketing, and product teams.
Read →"I want metrics," said the GM
When our GM wanted aggregated metrics for a product launch, I skipped the two-week Grafana route and shipped a lightweight dashboard in under an hour.
Read →The Metaphor Generator Nobody Asked For
After telling her team she needed better, funnier metaphors for explaining product work, Lauren built The Metaphorator — and learned when not to over-engineer.
Read →I Spent Three Weeks Obsessing When, In Fact, I Was Measuring the Wrong Thing
Three weeks spiraling over a zero-signups dashboard taught me the difference between performance metrics and decision metrics.
Read →Building My First MCP
Building a working Matomo MCP in under two hours — and what the experiment taught me even after Anthropic launched Skills 30 minutes later.
Read →Building My First Claude Skill
Claude launched Skills this week, and I decided to experiment and ship my first Skill: an anti-ai-writing skill that catches formulaic language before it lands on the page.
Read →Show Don't Tell Isn't Just for Improv
Show, Don't Tell
Read →I Got Tired of Scrolling, So I Shipped Code Instead
As Head of Product, I merged a PR adding a search field to an internal admin tool — zero impact on revenue, and completely fine.
Read →Supercharge Your Non-Technical Role with Cursor
Working at a technical company as a non-technical person? Turn AI tools into your technical translator and become the bridge between code and business value.
Read →Stop Theorizing, Start Building
I don't code. I also just deployed my own AI agent application.
Read →Building My AI Doppelganger: A Product Manager's Guide to Scaling Yourself
How I treated my own scalability as a product problem and built a custom GPT decision-making doppelganger to help my team think like product managers.
Read →LLMs: A Librarian's Revenge
Why the world's first Large Language Model was a librarian — and how reference interviews were proto-prompt engineering all along.
Read →An Accidental PM's Year of Miles and Milestones
One year ago, I joined amazee.io as an accidental product manager, and twelve months later I'm writing from a Zurich hotel having just been appointed Head of Product.
Read →Comfort with Chaos: Improv Wisdom for AI Adoption
How the skills from a life in improv theater translate directly into adapting to AI as a product manager.
Read →Making It Up at Scale: From Theater to Funded Tech
We secured funding for our AI product, and my first thought wasn't about KPIs — it was standing backstage at AdLib Theatre waiting for the audience's suggestion.
Read →I Always Wanted to be a Doctor, Librarian, Performer... oops, I became a Product Manager
How a winding path through library science and improv comedy turned into product management — and why a non-traditional background became a superpower.
Read →Welp, I'm Head of Product Now
Adventures in pretending to know what I'm doing.
Read →DON'T MISS THE NEXT ONE
New posts land in AI Out Loud — plain-English AI every other Sunday.
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