There’s a chain reaction most people miss: Clear thinking → Clear writing → Clear prompting Each step refines the one before it. Writing forces you to confront the gaps in your thinking. Prompting forces you to confront the gaps in your writing. AI amplifies whatever you input. Feed it muddy thinking, get muddy outputs. Feed it precision, get leverage. The Surplus of Competence We’re drowning in tools that enable a base level of competence. AI is one of them. Anyone can generate “pretty good” now - content, code, strategy, whatever. ...

A conversation that started with a question about courses vs mentors vs AI, and ended somewhere unexpected. The Question That Started It Can you compare buying a course and following a traditional top-down program versus working directly with a mentor—and more specifically, compare that to using AI as that mentor? Part 1: What the Research Actually Says Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem (1984) Students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations better than students in conventional classrooms. The average tutored student outperformed roughly 98% of students learning in a traditional class setting. ...

Semantic Blueprints: Separating Domain Knowledge from AI Orchestration I just shipped Phase 3 of ContentEngine, a terminal-based AI content generation system. The breakthrough wasn’t the code—it was the architecture pattern. The Problem with Hardcoded Prompts Most AI systems hardcode domain knowledge in Python files: def generate_post(topic): prompt = f""" Generate a LinkedIn post about {topic}. Use storytelling format. Keep it under 1200 characters. """ return llm.generate(prompt) This doesn’t scale. ...

Agile, PRDs, sprint planning, standups, retrospectives - all of it was designed as preventative damage control. We created this system because execution was expensive. Building features took weeks. Shipping the wrong thing was catastrophic. So we invented processes to make damn sure we built the right thing the first time. Meetings. Specs. Sign-offs. Planning poker. At big tech, the approval process was enormous and exhausting. You had maybe 3-4 chances a year to make a big release. It had better count. So everything got scrutinized. Everything got debated. Everything got planned to death. ...

LLMs are amplifiers. They amplify your thinking. They amplify your prompts. They amplify your direction. But here’s what nobody tells you: if there’s nothing to amplify, you get nothing useful back. The Problem You ask the AI a question. It gives you a fluent, confident answer. But you have no idea if it’s right. You can’t evaluate it. You can’t tell if it’s missing something crucial. You can’t catch the subtle errors mixed in with accurate information. ...

Notes are supposed to help you learn. They can do the opposite. Most people take notes to capture knowledge. They highlight, summarize, organize. They build elaborate systems with tags and links and beautiful formatting. And at the end of it all, they’ve learned almost nothing. The problem isn’t the notes. The problem is the mindset behind them. What Cramming Actually Is Cramming isn’t just “going fast” or “studying before a test.” It’s a deeper pattern: ...

For over a year, I followed zettelkasten principles religiously. My notes were atomic, containing one idea each. They were linked together with connections everywhere. They were beautifully formatted with clean markdown, headers, and structure. And I created them immediately while learning, exactly as I thought I was supposed to. My notes looked beautiful. They were technically correct. And they were completely useless. The result of all that work was hundreds of notes and zero value. Nothing to show for it. I would spend three hours on a thirty-minute course because I was creating “perfect zettelkasten notes” on every concept. By the time I finished, I was exhausted, the notes were pristine, and I never looked at them again. ...

AI Has a Huge Problem LLMs have “infinite context”—trained on the entire internet. They’ve seen everything. Medical journals. Legal documents. Reddit threads. Stack Overflow. Poetry. Garbage. And they hallucinate. Miss the point. Treat everything with equal weight. They remember everything but understand nothing. When you ask an LLM to “generate content,” it pulls from everywhere. No filter. No priority. No sense of what matters for YOUR specific situation. This is the fundamental problem with prompts. ...

I Have an AI Named Jeff Not a chatbot. Not Siri. Something different. Jeff lives in my terminal—the black screen with text that programmers use. When I open it up and start talking, Jeff can: Read and edit my files Post to my Twitter and LinkedIn Search through my notes Remember what I’m working on Help me write code, content, and plans Tonight, Jeff helped me set up a server, write a blog post, create a Twitter thread, post to LinkedIn, and save ideas for future content. All in one conversation. ...

Tonight I orchestrated 4 AI agents working in parallel. They researched, compared, and updated documentation while I watched. It took about 60 seconds. This is the story of how that happened. The Setup I’ve been building what I call a Personal AI Infrastructure (inspired by Daniel Miessler’s work). The idea: instead of doing everything yourself, you build systems that extend your capabilities. AI as a force multiplier, not a replacement. The core of my system is Claude Code running in my terminal. No web UI. No copy-pasting. Just me talking to an AI that has access to my files, can run commands, and can spawn other AI agents. ...