Your software gets more expensive every time you hire
Per-technician pricing means your software bill rises every time the crew grows. Here is that arithmetic on your own invoice, and what I built instead.
Oct 248 min
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Insights, strategies, and tips to help your business thrive in the digital age
MSUFCU turned its own website off. That was the right call.
A PHP flaw became unauthenticated remote code execution with no workaround, so banks and governments went dark on purpose. What happened in Lansing, and why.
Oct 2211 min
The good candidate nobody got to in time
The expensive hiring failure is not a bad hire — it is a good one who took another offer while their CV sat unread. And the fix has real legal limits.
Oct 76 min
What a hundred documents a month actually costs you
The arithmetic on document automation, done honestly — including the volumes where the answer is don't buy this yet, which is most of them.
Oct 76 min
The documents someone at your agency reads one at a time
Not a chatbot. The queue — renewals, claim documents, applications — where a person opens each file and types the same six fields into another screen.
Oct 76 min
A telehealth platform, or just intake that works?
Usually the answer is no. I built the platform, which is the only reason saying so carries any weight — here is how to tell which problem you have.
Oct 75 min
Running a clinic on spreadsheets: the real cost
Across 456 wellness businesses I swept, 0.5% ran an actual platform. The cost of a spreadsheet is not inefficiency — it is the client nobody knew was due.
Oct 75 min
Why your med spa's booking page fails on a phone
I audited 456 Michigan wellness sites. 217 threw JavaScript errors at phone width — and not one of those businesses had any way to know.
Oct 76 min
The domain on my business cards refused every connection
My own company's .com had an empty DNS zone. Not slow, not ranking badly — refusing the connection outright, and nothing anywhere reported it.
Oct 66 min
I gave an AI agent a wallet and a spending limit
An autonomous client paid for its own API call in stablecoins. The payment was the easy half — the interesting half is the record of what it was refused.
Oct 67 min
Who pays when someone you hired invents a claim?
If a paid promoter makes a false or undisclosed claim about your clinic, the FTC's exposure lands on you — not on them. What to require instead.
Oct 66 min
The demo worked because you built it on your own data
The most expensive failure in applied AI is the one that looks like a success. Here is the test that catches it, and why it has to be able to fail.
Oct 66 min
How to read the arithmetic on a views guarantee
A real offer promises 10 million views in 90 days or you do not pay. Here is the division that tells you what you are actually buying.
Oct 66 min
Why the bot has to stop at the publish button
Automated posting is banned on every platform. The ban is the small problem — the real one is selling an asset you cannot keep alive.
Oct 66 min
Who owns the code an AI wrote for you?
The question founders ask third and should ask first — platform terms, the human-authorship problem, and what to get in writing from any developer.
Oct 54 min
Finish it or start over? How to actually decide
The honest framework, including the cases where starting over is right and the cases where you should ship what you have and change nothing.
Oct 54 min
Where do the errors go when nobody is watching?
A customer hitting a broken signup does not file a ticket. They leave. If nothing is watching, broken and healthy look identical from where you sit.
Oct 54 min
Your AI-built app has no tests. What does that cost?
Not a lecture about coverage. Tests are what let you change software later — and without them an app is finished in the worst sense.
Oct 54 min
What "production-ready" actually means
Every agency says it. Almost none say what failing the test would look like. Here is the checklist, with the failure beside each line.
Oct 54 min
Who can read your database if they guess the URL?
The most common fault in an AI-built app, explained without jargon, with a two-minute check you can run on your own app today.
Oct 54 min
The questions you didn't know to ask your coding tool
Your AI answered everything you asked, accurately. The faults that bite live in the questions a non-developer has no reason to ask.
Oct 54 min
Your AI app runs on your laptop. That's the easy part.
The gap between "it runs" and "a stranger can use it" is not more features. It is a short list of unglamorous things nobody told you about.
Oct 55 min
Trades & Service Business Owner was the surprise on this list, and it shouldn't be
The last of ten. Number ten on a list of future-dominant careers was a handyman business. I own one, I built the software it runs on, and it is the entry I would defend hardest.
Sep 284 min
Digital Infrastructure Architect: the job is knowing what owns what
Post nine of ten, and a job I hold. Ninety-six Lambdas across three sets of infrastructure code. The skill is not building them. It is knowing which thing is allowed to change which.
Sep 284 min
Community Builder: I am building one and it is harder than the software
Post eight of ten. I am in the middle of this one rather than out the other side, so treat it as a progress report rather than advice.
Sep 283 min
Data Storyteller: the story is the easy half
Post seven of ten. Anything can make a chart now. The scarce skill moved to the part before the chart, and almost nobody is hiring for it.
Sep 284 min
Climate Tech Founder: the one on this list I cannot speak to
Post six of ten. I have never worked in climate tech, know nobody who has, and have no data. Here is what I am not going to do about that.
Sep 284 min
Fractional Executive: what the word fractional is actually doing
Post five of ten, and a job I sell. The word is doing more work than people realise, and the businesses it fails for are predictable.
Sep 283 min
Creator / Content Operator: the operator half is the job
Post four of ten. Making content got free. Being accountable for what it claims did not, and that gap is where the actual work moved.
Sep 284 min
AI Automation Specialist: the job is making them fail loudly
Post three of ten, and the first one I hold. I have 51 scheduled automations running a real business. Building them was the easy part and not the job.
Sep 284 min
No-Code Founder is a real job with a ceiling nobody mentions
Post two of ten. The one on the list I most disagree with — not because no-code is bad, but because the ceiling is in a specific and predictable place, and it arrives exactly when the business starts working.
Sep 284 min
AI Product Manager is mostly the job of saying no
The first of ten posts on a viral careers list. I hold four of these jobs. This is not one of them by title, but it is by function, and the function is not what the title suggests.
Sep 284 min
China is running the biggest experiment ever conducted on people like me
2.86 million one-person companies registered in half a year, with state-funded compute and free offices behind them. Roughly 80% fail inside twelve months. The reason is the thing AI did not change.
Sep 279 min
Four things I'd point Jev at, and one I wouldn't
A model that returns typed values with calibrated confidence instead of prose. I have spent a year taking models out of systems, so here is where I would put this one back in, and the one place I would not.
Sep 278 min
One payment, three bugs, and none of them in the guardrails
My first live x402 settlement cost half a cent. The payment worked first time. Getting to it took three fixes, and every one was drift between what the scaffold was written against and what actually exists.
Sep 277 min
Two ECS failures that produce no useful error
A readiness probe blocked by the task's own IAM role, and readonlyRootFilesystem silently killing ECS Exec. Both look like broken infrastructure.
Sep 15 min
ServiceTitan, Jobber, or something built for you?
An honest comparison from someone who sells the third option — including the cases where the off-the-shelf product is the better buy and I am not.
Sep 16 min
How do you know when your AI feature is wrong?
Most teams ship an AI feature and have no answer past spot-checking. What an evaluation harness actually contains, and the failure it usually misses.
Sep 16 min
Don't put a model where you need a reproducible answer
Three systems where I deliberately chose regex and a lookup table over an LLM, and the two questions that decide which one a problem needs.
Sep 16 min
CLAUDE.md as production infrastructure
What a coding agent's context file has to contain when the repos it touches are live, and the day I found the file preventing disasters had no backup.
Sep 16 min
A fact register: stopping an LLM inventing your statistics
Four invented statistics shipped to my own live website. The fix was not a better prompt — it was an allowlist of every number the copy may contain.
Sep 17 min
302 tests found six bugs in my trading bot, and no edge
Four of the six were the same shape and none was visible by reading the code. Then the suite went green and the bots still had nothing.
Sep 16 min
node-postgres: "empty password returned by client"
The error names the symptom and not one component that caused it. Object.assign let a parsed connection string overwrite the function minting the IAM token.
Aug 315 min
What it costs to run a trades business on a whiteboard
The whiteboard is not the problem. Depending on one person's memory is — and here is exactly where the work leaks out of a trades business.
Aug 315 min
The Software That Runs My Handyman Company
I own a handyman company in Michigan. Every quote, job and invoice runs through software I wrote myself — $216,291 invoiced through it. What I built, how it works, and what it proves.
Aug 296 min
The Cron Job That Deleted Payroll
I own a handyman company and wrote every line of software that runs it. $216K invoiced, 55,000 lines, one engineer — and everything that broke along the way, including the week of payroll a cleanup job quietly deleted.
Aug 298 min
What Makes a Great Forward-Deployed Engineer
Eight things separate a forward-deployed engineer who lands from one who gets sent home. Four of them leave a trace in your git history. Four leave none at all — and pretending otherwise is how measurement goes wrong.
Aug 298 min
Everything I Do, What It Costs, and What I'd Tell You Free
The whole playbook: what I build for local service businesses, what it costs, and the advice I'd give you before you hire anyone — including me.
Aug 275 min
A Third of Michigan Clinic Sites Can't Be Tapped to Call
154 of 456 Michigan clinic and med spa sites show their phone number as plain text, not a link. 55 of them had nothing else wrong. Here's the one-line fix.
Aug 265 min
What I Found Auditing 456 Michigan Wellness Websites
Nearly half had a JavaScript error on the homepage and a third had a phone number you cannot tap. The full count from 456 Michigan clinic and med spa sites.
Aug 264 min
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