Insights
Judgment Is the Real Moat Now
With AI you can spin up an MVP in an afternoon and iterate at absurd speed. But speed was never the moat. Judgment is. Claude Code is an incredible junior developer, tireless, insanely fast, and awful at the big calls. Building my own AI receptionist, it tried to dump secrets into call transcripts, hand a sensitive credential where it didn't belong, and let a Florida cabinet shop read an Oregon pest control shop's data. Every "no, you're being dumb, here's the fix" was the actual job. It's elite at iteration and terrible at judgment, and in a world where everyone has the same fast junior dev, the person with the best judgment wins.
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Product Review: Airtable Is a Toy Pretending to Be a Database
Next up in the review series, and you know I don't pull punches: Airtable is garbage. One out of ten. Google Sheets is simple and cheap; Supabase is a real Postgres database that scales. Airtable sits in the awkward middle, priced like enterprise software while refusing to be a real database. No SQL, no foreign keys, no row-level security, and an API so crippled (5 requests a second, 10 records each) it would take 40 minutes just to read 125k records. It's a toy pretending to be a database.
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The $200 Subscription That Replaced a Million-Dollar Dev Team
My standing desk was a good ROI. Claude Code is an absurd one. At its core my company is a CRM, the kind of build that pre-AI means roughly 20 developers, three years, and millions of dollars. My version: me, six months, clients on the MVP by month two, and a $200-a-month subscription. That's $2,400 a year against a seven-figure build. Add Joe 3.5 saving 10 hours a week of my $1,500-an-hour time, and the math stops being a percentage. Run your own numbers, they'll embarrass you.
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If You Want Clients, Start Blogging
If you want clients, start blogging. I'm not theorizing, I'm looking at the numbers. Since July 11th I've just been sending voice memos to my AI assistant Joe 3.5 and letting him publish them. The result: 2,178 impressions, up 24%, and the audience is exactly right, senior folks, IT services, founders, small companies. Product is easier to build than ever, so distribution is the new moat. My mentor Rich called it: just start, and the clients come.
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