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Essays, playbooks, and short notes on software, digital marketing, and start-up operating. One new piece each week.

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Claude Sonnet vs Opus: A Practitioner's Guide to Choosing the Right Model

The Claude 4 family. Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7. gives builders three meaningful tiers to choose from. Pick the wrong one and you're either burning money on a task that didn't need the firepower, or shipping a feature that almost works. The right choic

Gemini 3.1 Pro Long Context: Patterns That Hold Up in Production

Long context is the dimension where Gemini's family has consistently distinguished itself. With Gemini 3.1 Pro, the ability to process very large inputs in a single call is mature enough to ship into production for serious analytical workloads. codebase reason

Claude Sonnet 4.6 for Production AI Features: A Builder's Guide

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the model most production AI features should be built on. It's the workhorse of the Claude 4 family. strong enough to handle complex reasoning, fast enough to drive real-time features, and priced for the volume that production usage actual

Claude Opus 4.6 for Complex Reasoning Tasks: When and How to Use It

Opus 4.6 is the model you reach for when the answer matters and the question is hard. It's slower than Sonnet, costs more per token, and you should be deliberate about every call you make to it. But when the task is genuinely complex. multi-step reasoning, dee

Process Mapping Before Automation: A One-Hour Method That Prevents Six-Month Failures

One hour of process mapping before I start building has prevented at least three projects that would have taken six months and delivered nothing useful. The clients who skip it give me a problem statement that sounds specific ("automate our invoice approval pr

The Hidden Cost of n8n and Make: When Code Becomes the Cheaper Option

n8n costs $20 per month on the cloud plan. Make costs $9 per month on the basic tier. These numbers lead teams to choose them over writing code. They are also the least important numbers in the decision. After running both platforms at production scale for cli

The Automation Audit: How to Decide What to Automate vs. Leave Alone

I have run this audit more than forty times across clinics, law firms, e-commerce brands, logistics companies, and agencies. The clients who skip it spend six months automating the wrong things and then blame the technology. The audit itself takes about three

Localising Marketing Across Five Countries Without Five Agencies

In late 2023 I took on an engagement that was described to me as "expanding our paid and organic marketing into four new markets." The client was a SaaS product that had found product-market fit in the UK and wanted to add Germany, France, UAE, and Pakistan. T

When to Stop Bootstrapping and Raise: A Decision Tree With Real Numbers

Most founders I talk to treat the bootstrapping-versus-raising decision as a values question. Do you want to maintain control? Do you believe in the VC model? Are you building a lifestyle business or a venture-scale company? These are real questions worth answ

Killing a Product Line Without Killing the Company

In 2022, I helped a SaaS company shut down a product line that represented 35% of their revenue. It was the right decision. It was also terrifying, slow, and handled worse than it should have been. By the time we finished the wind-down, we had lost two custome