513 posts about AI, learning, and building products
I spent 6 months trying to become a game developer while keeping my day job. I built three projects, wrote 684 commits, and shipped exactly zero games. Here is what happened, what I learned, and why nothing shipped.
I pushed what should have been an upgrade to my podcast platform's voice system. Six days and several commits later, I deleted 2,724 lines of code and rolled back to what worked. Here is what happened and what it taught me about testing production AI changes.
Nineteen days after cancelling Claude Max, my pattern has settled. Codex with GPT-5.4 on xHigh took the coding seat. Claude Code with Opus 4.7 on xHigh took every other seat at the desk.
People still message me asking if the 7 Andrew Ng courses I recommended in 2023 are the right path today. Short answer: most of them, yes, but with a different roadmap around them. Here is my 2026 update, with per-course verdicts and a forked path for builders and operators.
Prova started feeling real to me when the product began making real promises about progression, billing, auth, and state. The hard part was not generating code. It was building the contracts around it.
I keep seeing AI tools pitch agencies on content volume. But if you've ever managed real client relationships, you know the harder problem is trust: isolation, permissions, context, and not leaking one client's thinking into another's.
I thought I could splice together one course module, trim a few transitions, and call it a YouTube video. I was wrong. Building The Parade Problem taught me that good repurposing is not clipping. It is redesigning the idea for a different promise, a different audience, and a different first 30 seconds.
I cancelled Claude Max after 13 months and US$1,892.38 in subscription fees. This is not a victory lap. It is a 30-day test to see whether I can keep shipping STRATUM, DIALOGUE, my course platform, and this site at the same pace with Codex as my primary tool.
Two weeks after my original comparison, both tools shipped major updates. Codex challenged my product strategy in ways Claude Code did not. Claude Code shipped Agent Teams and AutoMemory. The result: I am cutting my $200/month Max plan — and getting better output for less money.
Most conversations about AI and team design start with headcount. I think that is the wrong starting point. The better question is which functions your team needs — and those turn out to be the same whether you have four people or forty.
DIALØGUE supports 7 languages, but the real multilingual work was not translating strings. It was fixing audience-local dates, TTS consistency, UI language drift, and deciding where quality mattered enough to slow down.
I spent years in advertising watching teams confuse motion with progress. Then I started building AI marketing tools and realized the problem was getting worse: faster execution, weaker judgment.