Build Notes

Short lessons from real projects: code reviews, audits, AI mistakes, SEO gaps, and shipping decisions. Practical notes for founders and developers.

I Built 4 SaaS Products With AI. Total Revenue: $279. Creation got commoditized. 7 min read · You leave with: A reason to spend your effort on edge and distribution instead of the build
Entity SEO Audit: Why AI Search Couldn't See My 5 Sites I ran 5 sites and 58 articles; to crawlers and AI models I didn't exist. 7 min read · You leave with: A checklist and two JSON-LD snippets to give your own sites a connected identity
AI Can Create Convincing Justification for Expensive Bad Decisions AI can produce correct evidence, polished reasoning and the wrong decision. 9 min read · You leave with: A seven-field pre-investigation brief you can paste into your next AI assignment
How AI Tackles Tasks Differently Than Humans Experience lets you shrink a problem before you solve it. 13 min read · You leave with: Three questions for splitting any job between you and the machine
Does Claude Watermark Text? Yes. Do Nothing, Here's Why Claude is rolling out invisible text watermarks. 7 min read · You leave with: A clear position: assume the mark is there, do nothing now, and revisit if a detector ships
Do Startup Directories Drive Traffic? 4 Products, 90 Days One product got zero referral sessions from 18 directories. 6 min read · You leave with: A decision on whether your product's category makes directories worth the time
Every Child of a Product Needs Its Own Moat Clean content isn't enough. 3 min read · You leave with: One test for any page: can you name what it says that a competitor's page cannot?
Claude Design Brand Kit: GitHub Repo to Live Page in a Night I tested Claude Design the night it launched: a brand kit from a GitHub repo in 40 minutes, then a landing page live in production before morning. 8 min read · You leave with: A realistic sense of what a repo-to-brand-kit run gives you, and what to check afterwards
Automate Cloudflare Cache Purge + Warm After Deploy (Bash) Manual Cloudflare purges and cold first hits cost me 30 minutes a day. 5 min read · You leave with: The sitemap parse and parallel warm commands to build this step into your own deploy
5 Structural Patterns That Survive Every Code Review File-by-file review reads each file in isolation and calls it fine. 5 min read · You leave with: Five shell checks you can run on your own app today
AI Trusts Your Docs. That's the Problem. AI validates bad assumptions when you hand it bad ground truth. 5 min read · You leave with: Five rules for your CLAUDE.md that make audits check the code, not the doc
Audit Before You Spread the Mess Working code can still be wrong. 3 min read · You leave with: A verdict for each page, and a rule: fix the pattern, then update every consumer
Don't Assume AI Fixes Things Properly AI coding tools are good at text manipulation. 3 min read · You leave with: A three-step check (tinker, log, route) to run before accepting an AI fix

This isn’t theory. It’s what I learned by doing it wrong first.

Each post has the context, the mistake (or the win), and the rule I now follow. Short posts. One insight each. No fluff.

Working With AI

5 Structural Patterns That Survive Every Code Review: What file-by-file review misses
AI Trusts Your Docs. That’s the Problem.: Five rules that turned audits from confirmation exercises into bug-finding machines
Don’t Assume AI Fixes Things Properly: Why “looks right” isn’t the same as “works”
How AI Tackles Tasks Differently Than Humans: Humans shrink a problem, machines explore it, and 106 studies say bolting them together makes it worse
AI Can Create Convincing Justification for Expensive Bad Decisions: Why human-in-the-loop AI needs company context before it turns a plausible premise into a polished project
Audit Before You Spread the Mess: Finding structural problems before they multiply

Tools & Platforms

Does Claude Watermark Text? Yes. Do Nothing, Here’s Why: Claude marks its text now, nobody can read it, and the viral removal tool doesn’t remove it
Claude Design Brand Kit: GitHub Repo to Live Page in a Night: Brand kit from a GitHub repo, landing page to production same night

Identity & Visibility

Entity SEO Audit: Why AI Search Couldn’t See My 5 Sites: Entity coherence: why crawlers couldn’t connect 5 sites to one builder
Do Startup Directories Drive Traffic? 4 Products, 90 Days: One product got zero, another got a quarter of its referred traffic. Comes with the free tool: Launch Directories, 101 vetted directories, with what each one demands before it will publish you
Every Child of a Product Needs Its Own Moat: Clean content isn’t enough if there’s no reason for it to rank

The Business of Building

I Built 4 SaaS Products With AI. Total Revenue: $279.: A year of AI-built products, what they made, and why the build was never the hard part

Deploy & Infrastructure

Automate Cloudflare Cache Purge + Warm After Deploy (Bash): Cache purge, warm, and sitemap QA in one script