Subscribe now

Promo Codes

Before going forward, a little bit of housekeeping: as you know, all subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Make your pick below:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• 999 Wise Quotes. A curated and verified collection of the world’s greatest minds, spoken and supported with AI reflection. Promo code 999NOW, 50% off of Wisdom Vault (full access)

• Shape Walk. Walk shapes to stay in shape, my very own fitness apps, which lets you design shapes over your neighborhood and walk them. Promo code WALKNOW for 50% off of the Pro annual plan.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager - this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

Vibe Coding for People Over Fifty

That would be my generation, fwiw. I was lucky enough to grow up before any digital malformation of our lives. I played in the dirt, took care of cows at my grandparents house in the country side, knew how to feed the pigs, the chickens and the turkey and slept in a chariot full of freshly cut grass (I will never forget that fragrance).

For decades, these made me a little bit obsolete. Then AI come. Now I can build whatever I want in plain English, and the main differentiator is not coding skill: it’s what questions I ask. And, just like that, the apparent obsoletion became my bigger advantage.

Because I grew up in a time where true interaction was a the core of our lives, unmediated by screens and the commoditization of attention, I simply know what matters, just like that.

By the way, when I say “I know”, I literally mean, “we know”, if you’re from the same generation. Anyway, here’s the link to the full article.

Introducing Mood 4 Love

I have 2 apps in my pipeline now, both in late testing stage, meaning those who signed up for TestFlight builds already have their hands on them. In the paid section, below, I will detail what one of them, Mood 4 Love, is all about.

To all my readers, thank you for your support, see you next week, and for the paid ones, keep reading.

Read more

I began June with a fixed plan.

I had already cancelled the $100 Claude Code Max subscription and committed to running a full month on MiniMax 3 at $20/month. The explicit goal was to test whether coding quality remained usable across real, large codebases at roughly one-fifth the previous cost.

About two weeks into that test, a different offer surfaced.

Grok was available at $35 for the first three months, then $35/month ongoing. In addition to the coding model, it included image and video generation that neither Claude nor MiniMax delivered at a comparable level.

At that point the original experiment was no longer the strongest available option.

I changed direction.

What I was not willing to abandon was the interface. I had built months of familiarity with Claude Code — the commands, the way it navigates projects, the overall flow. That accumulated comfort had practical value. At the same time, the economics plus the new creative capabilities on Grok were clearly superior to continuing the MiniMax test for the sake of completing it.

I kept the existing client and changed only what sits behind it.

The full technical steps — how I routed Grok’s model into the current Claude Code installation using a local proxy — are documented here.

This is the third distinct pricing and capability setup I have used in five months: $100 on Claude alone, $120 when I layered in MiniMax as backup, and now $35 with Grok handling both coding work and media generation.

The relevant point is not that every experiment must be driven to completion. It is that when a materially better combination appears midway, the rational response is to adjust the plan rather than continue the original test out of attachment to the initial framing.

The real constraint is speed of recognition: how quickly you can see that the current arrangement has been overtaken by a stronger one.

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about how you can manage AI cognitive overload, and, for my paying subscribers, I share my latest discovery: how can you get paid for vibe-coding. If you’re not premium yet, you can subscribe below, it takes less than 5 seconds.

Subscribe now

Promo Codes

Before going forward, a little bit of housekeeping: as you know, all subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Make your pick below:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• 999 Wise Quotes. A curated and verified collection of the world’s greatest minds, spoken and supported with AI reflection. Promo code 999NOW, 50% off of Wisdom Vault (full access)

• Shape Walk. Walk shapes to stay in shape, my very own fitness apps, which lets you design shapes over your neighborhood and walk them. Promo code WALKNOW for 50% off of the Pro annual plan.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager - this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

Managing AI Cognitive Overload

There’s literally nothing you can throw at a decent LLM model these days that would NOT be created. Making something with code used to be the biggest bottleneck, now this is gone. And the biggest bottleneck shifted to… you.

I call this AI cognitive overload and it’s something that we, as a species, never experienced before. I first hit when I shipped 9 apps in 4 months. The first 2-3 were ok, but as the number grew, the complexity if just managing my workspace also grew… but exponentially.

So, I came up with a little strategy of how to solve this, and it involves 3 steps: increment in very small steps, save aggressively and take frequent breaks. I put all the details in this blog post.

Getting Paid to… Vibe Code

The last area of unclaimed attention was the feedback given by your agent while it’s building. You know, the “Discombobulating…” thing. Well, not anymore, there is a way to actually turn that into revenue. As usual, I share all the details to my paid subscribers.

To everyone else, thank you for being with me on this journey, and see you next week!

Read more

I shipped 9 iOS apps in 4 months - assisted by AI. This also almost broke me — but not in the way you’d expect.

The AI was mostly ok the whole time. It didn’t drift, never got confused, never needed a coffee. I did - especially the coffee part.

Here’s what happens when you try to move at AI speed: you end up context switching constantly. Nine different apps, nine different codebases, nine ongoing conversations with the AI, each one picking up mid-thought from wherever you left off. The AI handles that with no effort. You handle it by slowly losing the big picture, your passion, and maybe, fi you don’t address this upfront, your mind.

I calling this “AI cognitive overload”. It’s not exactly burnout — it’s more like running too many tabs in your browser and feeling all of them slow down.

When I realized this is actually serious, I started to engage it. I found out 3 things that helped.

The first was shrinking my steps down further than felt reasonable. The temptation with AI is to go big — hand it something chunky and let it run. That almost always goes sideways. It drifts. It solves a slightly different problem than the one you had. By the time you notice, you’ve lost a lot of ground. Small steps — one function, one screen, one bug — keep it honest and keep you in control. It feels slower, until you realize you’re making constant progress.

The second was saving obsessively. Not because I’m afraid of losing work, I am a big fan of version control, but because a commit is a note to future-me about where things stand. When I switch to a different app and come back three hours later, that checkpoint is the difference between a clean re-entry and 20 minutes of reconstructing what I was even doing. At the pace I was moving, that reconstruction cost added up fast.

The third was breaks. Actual ones, not “I’ll just fix this one thing first” breaks. The AI doesn’t need to rest. I kept acting like I didn’t either. Well, back to reality, here comes gravity: I did. The mental cache only clears when you step away. There’s no shortcut for it.

None of this is groundbreaking advice. Small steps, save your work, take breaks — you’ve heard it. What changed for me was understanding why it matters more now than before. When you’re working with a tool that never slows down, never loses track, and never needs to stop — you become the bottleneck. All the friction that used to pace you naturally is gone, and you have to pace yourself deliberately or the pace does it for you, badly.

The AI will keep up with whatever you throw at it.

The question now is whether you can keep up with yourself.

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about why you should try migrate towards local, private AI models, and, if you’re premium, about my surprising findings after deciding to move from Claude to MiniMax 3. If you’re not premium yet, you can subscribe below, it takes less than 5 seconds.

Subscribe now

Promo Codes

Before going forward, a little bit of housekeeping: as you know, all subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Make your pick below:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• 999 Wise Quotes. A curated and verified collection of the world’s greatest minds, spoken and supported with AI reflection. Promo code 999NOW, 50% off of Wisdom Vault (full access)

• Shape Walk. Walk shapes to stay in shape, my very own fitness apps, which lets you design shapes over your neighborhood and walk them. Promo code WALKNOW for 50% off of the Pro annual plan.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager - this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

Local, Private AI Is Not Optional Anymore

I already wrote about this on my blog and here on Substack, but I just want to add something on top. Yes, the pace of AI is so quick that even a few days can make a big difference.

Since I wrote the piece on local AI, a new provider announced an upgrade to their model. It’s about GLM 5.2. It’s still a Chinese provider, and still an open-source model.

The difference: everybody who tested it says it’s on par with Claude Opus 4.8. That’s a huge statement, but that’s where the consensus seems to be.

Now, to run GLM 5.2 you will need AT LEAST $10,000 worth of hardware, either 4 Nvidia Sparks, or a big Mac Studio with 512 GB. That’s just the entry level, you’d probably need slightly more to run it comfortable. But that will put you literally on the same level with SOTA models, for which you paid, just until a couple of weeks ago, hundreds, if not thousands, monthly.

And with that, we’re segueing to the paid part of this newsletter, where I give an update on my quest on the Claude replacements I’m testing. To all my readers, thank you for being here, and see you next week.

Read more

There is a pattern we keep missing and then we tend to kick ourselves when we miss it.

I happened with social media, for instance. Let’s say you built an audience on a platform. Then suddenly, and usually without notice, the platform changed the algorithm, or got bought, or got banned in your country, or decided your content violated a policy you never agreed to. Your audience — the one you spent years building — was rented, not owned. You were a tenant, not a landlord. Most of us figured this out too late.

Well, this is happening again with AI.

Last week, Anthropic released Fable 5. Three days later, the US government ordered them to shut it down for non-US users. Anthropic complied. Not because they wanted to — they said they simply couldn’t filter by nationality fast enough, so they pulled the plug for everyone. Three days. Then gone.

I’m not writing this to criticize Anthropic. They were in an impossible position (and they kinda brought this unto themselves, but that’s another story). I’m writing it because the moment was clarifying in a way that’s important.

Here’s the thing: you probably don’t think of your AI setup as a dependency. It just works. You open the app, you type, it responds. That’s what dependencies feel like — invisible, until they’re not. The Fable shutdown made the dependency visible. And visible dependencies are the ones you can do something about.

The good news is that the alternative already exists, and it’s actually good now.

Running local, private AI models used to mean accepting a significant quality gap. You ran something that was maybe 60% as capable as the frontier, and you made peace with that for the sake of privacy or cost. That trade-off is mostly gone. The open-source models released in the last few months — Kimi K2, GLM-5.2, MiniMax M3 — are legitimately competitive with closed frontier models on the tasks most people actually care about: coding, reasoning, long-context document work.

And the hardware is there too. A MacBook Pro M4 Max runs 70B models at 70 tokens per second. A $3,000 AMD mini PC gives you 128GB of unified memory. An Nvidia DGX Spark is the size of a Mac Mini. You don’t need a data center anymore - a strong, recent machine will do it.

This isn’t about being paranoid or anti-establishment. It’s about a much simpler thing: owning your tools.

A carpenter who rents their tools from someone isn’t really a carpenter. They’re a temporary operator of someone else’s equipment.

We are on the verge of a moment — not here yet, but approaching — where the users of commercial AI become the product in the same way social media users became the product. Your prompts, your workflows, your patterns of thought will be valuable training data. The incentive to harvest that is enormous and the infrastructure to do it already exists. I’m not saying every provider will do this. I’m saying the incentive will be very hard to resist, and by the time it’s obvious, it’ll be too late to matter.

The window where you can set up your own, private and local AI, for a reasonable cost, with models that are actually good, is open right now. But beware, these windows have a way of closing without giving notice.

Full breakdown of models and hardware here: https://dragosroua.com/running-local-private-ai-models-how-and-why/

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about the difference between prompting your agent and writing loops for your agent, about attention harvesting with Tetris, and, for premium subscribers, my take on why Anthropic Fable’s model was banned by the US government. If you’re not premium yet, you can subscribe below, it takes less than 5 seconds.

Subscribe now

Promo Codes

Before going forward, a little bit of housekeeping: as you know, all subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Make your pick below:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• 999 Wise Quotes. A curated and verified collection of the world’s greatest minds, spoken and supported with AI reflection. Promo code 999NOW, 50% off of Wisdom Vault (full access)

• Shape Walk. Walk shapes to stay in shape, my very own fitness apps, which lets you design shapes over your neighborhood and walk them. Promo code WALKNOW for 50% off of the Pro annual plan.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager - this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

From Prompts to Loops

For about two years, working with a coding agent meant one thing: you wrote a good prompt, shared enough context, read what came back, typed the next thing. The agent was a tool and you were holding it the entire time, one turn after another. Like a sculptor uses the chisel.

A loop hands that holding to a small system that finds the work, hands it out, checks it, writes down what’s done, and decides the next thing — and lets that poke the agent instead of you. It’s like your job is to create the sculptor now – or, to be more precise, a small army of sculptors.

I did my first experiment with writing loops last week, and I documented everything on my blog. This was a real life situation, solving real life problems (app delivery consistency) and the loop itself proved to be rather useful. Have a look at the whole process, the bugs it found and the lessons I learned.

Harvesting Attention with Tetris

One of the most impressive benefits of AI is how drastically it shortens the path from idea to product. Here’s an example: the other day, when I was waiting for Claude to finish compacting my session, I had an idea. What if I can intercept that, and then fire up a small Tetris game that runs inside the Terminal (no need to leave the Claude window) just to have some fun. It took me less than an hour from idea to the github push.

What was more important, though, was the mental exercise in finding out how valuable attention became, and how the last spots available are popping out where you least expect them. Have a look at the whole brainstorming here.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And if you’re on the premium layer, keep reading for my thoughts on the Fable debacle.

Read more

A few days ago I wrote up a small script — a loop that audits my iOS apps for two dull bits of release hygiene. If you want the code and the war stories, that’s over there. This article is about something else. It’s the part I didn’t put in the technical post, because it isn’t technical.

It’s what the whole loop paradigm made me think about for the rest of the week.

Do we need another fancy name: “loop engineering”?

Boris Cherny runs Claude Code at Anthropic. He’s said, more than once now, that he doesn’t really prompt the AI anymore — he writes loops that prompt it, and his job has become writing the loops. He mentioned, almost in passing, that he uninstalled his IDE in November because he’d stopped opening it.

The internet did what the internet does. Within seventy-two hours there was a name — “loop engineering” — a wave of breathless posts, and a counter-wave insisting it’s the end of programming as a craft, that we’re all going to forget how to code while autonomous loops quietly fill production with garbage nobody can fix.

I want to sit in the uncomfortable middle of that, because I think both ends miss what’s actually interesting.

The sculptor and the chisel

After sitting for a couple of days with it, something finally clicked.

For roughly two years, using a coding agent meant holding a chisel. You type, you read, you adjust, you type again. The agent is the tool and you are the sculptor, working the marble one strike at a time. Good work, but it’s your hands on it the whole time, and there’s only one of you.

A loop changes your job. You stop being the sculptor and start building the sculptor — an almost autonomous system that finds the marble, makes the cuts, checks its own work, and decides what to carve next. And once you’ve built one, the obvious move is to build a few more and point them at different blocks. You go from one pair of hands to an army of them.

That’s the leverage everyone’s excited about. It’s real. But notice what just quietly happened: you’re no longer the one who knows where every cut went. That’s the whole game, and it’s where the excitement and the danger live, sharing the same narrow space.

What my boring loop revealed

The loop I built is genuinely unremarkable. A for loop with an API call inside it. An average developer writes it in half an hour. No architecture to admire.

And yet running it changed how I see my own portfolio.

Not because the AI was clever. Because the loop forced me to write down what “done” means. To ship my apps consistently, I had to state — in plain English, precisely enough that a machine could check — what a finished app looks like. In this case, I had to define 2 very clear outcomes:

• A cross-promo section linking to the others.

• A version string in its exact shape, so that when I’m juggling six or seven apps in a day I can tell at a glance which build is which.

The moment those rules left my head and became text, they stopped being vibes and became a standard.

That’s the part the hype misses. The value wasn’t the automation. It was being made to articulate the thing I’d carried implicitly for months. The loop is just the forcing function. You could get most of the benefit from writing the checklist and never running the script — but you’d never write the checklist, because nothing forced you to. The loop is the reason you finally do.

Addy Osmani, a Google engineer who’s written sharply about all this, makes a related point I haven’t stopped chewing on: writing your project knowledge down where the agent reads it every run is really just intent paid for once instead of over and over. An agent starts every session cold and fills any gap in your intent with a confident guess. I’d push it further — writing it down is how you discover what your intent even was. Most of mine was undocumented because it had never been challenged. The loop challenged it.

Where the skill-decline critics are half right

The fear is that if loops do the work, the human atrophies. True — for one kind of work, and false for another.

If you let a loop write code you don’t read, you’ll lose the ability to write that code. That’s just practice, or the lack of it. The critics are right about that.

But the loop I built didn’t replace a skill I had. It replaced a chore I was avoiding. I was never going to manually diff every Settings screen before a release. That work simply wasn’t happening. The loop didn’t take a craft away — it did a thing I’d quietly decided wasn’t worth my hours. And in doing it, it surfaced a real bug that had been shipping for months.

So the honest question isn’t “will loops make me worse?” It’s “what am I actually automating — a skill I should keep sharp, or an avoidance I’d dressed up as a decision?” Completely different things, and the answer changes per task. I’ll write loops for the second category all day. I’m in no rush to hand over the first.

The line that reframed the whole debate for me

Osmani ends his piece on something that’s stuck harder than anything else I read this week. Two people can build the exact same loop and get completely opposite results. One uses it to move faster on work they understand deeply. The other uses it to avoid understanding the work at all. The loop doesn’t know the difference. You do.

That’s the thing. The loop is neutral. It’s an unbound amplifier. Point it at work you understand and it compounds your judgment. Point it at work you’re avoiding because you don’t want to understand it, and it compounds the avoidance — faster, and with a clean console output that makes the avoidance feel like progress.

Your army of sculptors will carve whatever you point them at, beautifully, including a statue of your own misunderstanding. They won’t tell you which one it is. Only you can.

The completion

If you take one thing from this, take the reframe, not the actual script.

The loop is boring, just fifty lines of vanilla Python. You won’t be impressed and you shouldn’t be. But building it makes you do two things you’ve been putting off: state precisely what “finished” means for your work, and find out where you’ve been trusting a process you never actually checked.

That’s available today, with the tools you already have, for the cost of one boring afternoon. You don’t need to be Boris Cherny. You don’t need an army running while you sleep. You need one repeating chore you’ve been avoiding and the willingness to write down, exactly, what doing it right looks like.

Build one sculptor first. Make it carve one good statue.

I write about building a portfolio of small software as one person, in public, without pretending it’s tidier than it is. If that’s your thing, you’re in the right place.

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about the post 30-day challenge blues, we look at how Twitter resurrected (at least for me), and, for premium subscribers, give the early results of my Claude Code to MiniMax switch If you’re not premium yet, you can subscribe below, it takes less than 5 seconds.

Subscribe now

Post 30-day Challenge Blues

Revisiting posts from 10-15 years ago, one at a time, in a 30-day challenge, proved to be a more intense challenge than I anticipated. The writing volume was not that bad. But the psychological consequences of revisiting so many beliefs and approaches was deeper and unexpected.

Most of the things I’ve written about seemed set in stone 10-15 years ago. Back then, they formed the foundation of my lifestyle, my business, my relationships. Revisiting that big slice of my life activities, with the “now” persona, put a very uncomfortable light on many of them. Some were shallow. Some were just borrowed motivational mumbo-jumbo. Some stuck, but not too many.

So, I’m in a little of a blues period, asking questions, waiting for the answers and just letting the dust settle over this. The 30-day challenge, as useful as it proved to be for my readers, accidentally brought a little bit of psychological chaos in my personal life. But chaos, in small dosage, is good for humans.

Twitter Resurrection

I wrote last week that Twitter seem to be living a second life, at least for me. I joined that platform in 2009, 17 years ago, and I’ve seen it go through many transformations. For years in a row I had a blast there, then there were years of silence.

The current algorithm, or just the quality of people there, seems to warrant the beginning of a new intense period. Recently, I’ve been participating in many interesting debates, seen many new founders and builders showing up, putting together businesses and interacting genuinely with their followers.

This is so contrasting with the previous Twitter management team, choked by the woke propaganda, that it seems like a completely new entity being activated there. Literally seems like Twitter is rising up from the dead. Let’s hope it sticks, you can follow me here, if you’re curious.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier.

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• 999 Wise Quotes. A curated and verified collection of world’s greatest minds, spoken and supported with AI reflection. Promo code 999NOW, 50% off of Wisdom Vault (full access)

• Shape Walk. Walk shapes to stay in shape, my very own fitness apps, which lets you design shapes over your neighborhood and walk them. Promo code WALKNOW for 50% off of the Pro annual plan.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager - this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And if you’re on the premium layer, keep reading for my Claude Code to MiniMax switchover.

Read more

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about a sudden surge in my Twitter activities, look back at the 30-day challenge, which just ended yesterday, and, for premium subscribers, do deep dive in switching from Claude Code to MiniMax (and potentially to a local first coding environment). If you’re not premium yet, you can subscribe below, it takes less than 5 seconds.

Twitter Surge

Something happened to my Twitter lately: I got a surge of new followers and I got days with 100k impressions overall, for my tweets and replies. This wasn’t in my plan, and I think it’s a combination of 2 things:

• some kind of threshold that triggered the algorithm and made me more visible. I do post targeted content, about AI, and vibe coding and X / Twitter is a good place for this.

• consistency: as part of my marketing activities I became more engaged and focused on more platforms. Coding has became the easy part, now the bottleneck is distribution, a.k.a. attention

I you’re on Twitter, let’s connect.

“Then and Now “ 30-day Challenge Finished - What Gives?

This is probably the most intense 30 day challenge that I ever attempted. It doesn’t show in the blog posts voice, and that’s the idea, maintain balance and keep producing relatable content. But it was tough. The challenge was started while I was in Europe, spanned Romania and Greece and was finished in Vietnam. Just making sure I won’t skip a day was a logistics feat.

It was also mentally taxing to go over to all the viral content I wrote 10-15 years ago and understand how it relates (or, to be more accurate, how it doesn’t relate anymore) to my current reality. All 30 articles are now side by side with their initial post in the main challenge hub post, if you’re curious.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier.

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• 999 Wise Quotes. A curated and verified collection of world’s greatest minds, spoken and supported with AI reflection. Promo code 999NOW, 50% off of Wisdom Vault (full access)

• Shape Walk. Walk shapes to stay in shape, my very own fitness apps, which lets you design shapes over your neighborhood and walk them. Promo code WALKNOW for 50% off of the Pro annual plan.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And if you’re on the premium layer, keep reading for my Claude Code to MiniMax switchover.

Read more

I published a post on my blog last Sunday with 6 guidelines for vibe coding as a senior developer (link at the end). It was an honest approach focusing on what AI assisted coding changes for someone who already writes code for more than 30 years.

I left out, intentionally, some details, namely the numbers. And by numbers I mean everything, from how many apps I would write again, up to the actual token costs.

My Substack seems to be the perfect spot to document that. So, here we go.

The most difficult app wasn’t the most technically complex one. It was Light Njoy — the iPhone-as-ambient-lamp app. Simply because I couldn’t tell when it was done. With a productivity app you have features and you can define testable outcomes. With an ambient experience, you try to create vibes, you work with emotions and “I like this, but I don’t know why”, so AI would be very happy to keep you in an endless loop of “let’s try this approach too, shall we?”. I rebuilt the aurora rendering layer three times across two sessions. The third session started from scratch with a fresh context and a tighter spec, and it took about 90 minutes. The previous two sessions had cost me the better part of two days.

That’s a case study in the genesis prompt principle from the post: I hadn’t spec’d what “done” looked like for an experience product. I’d spec’d the features but not the feeling. AI cannot infer what you feel like.

The Actual Numbers

• Total AI spend across four months: ~$540 (Claude Code Max at $100/month = $400, MiniMax/2 months = $50, Airlabs API/2 months = $90)

• Total hours: I work mornings and I try to keep it under 4 hours/day, but some days I focus more on marketing than on building (the post will also tell you why). Conservative estimate is 6-8 focused building hours per week — safe to ceil it at 100-130 hours total.

• Apps earning meaningful revenue: 3 out of 10 live. Keep in mind that some of them have just been luanched.

• Apps I’d build again knowing what I know now: 10 out of 10. Really, the thing that makes me happy is shipping stuff out, regardless of the difficulties.

The 6 guidelines in the blog post are the most important part of this experience, so far. Income will come and go, but the process will stay. And you can apply the process over and over, iterating on app ideas, audiences and marketing approaches.

Now, an honest confession about those guidelines: they are not set in stone. You will break all of them at least once, and the one you break most is the one that was most obviously right. For me that was verification. I know context drift is real. I’ve documented it. I still run sessions too long when I’m excited about a feature, getting caught in the whirlwind of thoughts and creative pushes.

What actually creates long lasting value isn’t knowing the guideline. It’s the real pain from the regression bug discovered at hour four, which eventually becomes the memory that makes you commit more aggressively at hour two.

Full post, with all six guidelines and the per-app breakdown: Vibe Coding for Senior iOS Developer - Guidelines after 10 Apps in 4 Months.

Subscribe now

Vibe Coding for Senior Developers

In an article published yesterday I share my experience, as a senior developer, after vibe coding and shipping 10 apps in 4 months. If you read my newsletter regularly you know what the apps are. What you may not know is what kind of technical challenge I had to solve for each. The blog post outlines all of them, along with a set of 6 guidelines that helped me stay afloat and productive. Go check it out here.

“Then and Now “ 30-day Challenge Keeping Momentum

I’m at post 22 of the challenge, in the last third. It is going great, many insights and discoveries because, obviously, in 10-15 years many things can change - both inside and outside.

If you want to follow the progress, just check the main challenge hub post, and make your pick, I won’t pollute the newsletter with all 7 posts written since last Monday.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. As of now, 2 more apps are added to the mix: Shape Walk, and 999 Wise Quotes. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• 999 Wise Quotes. A curated and verified collection of world’s greatest minds, spoken and supported with AI reflection. Promo code 999NOW, 50% off of Wisdom Vault (full access)

• Shape Walk. Walk shapes to stay in shape, my very own fitness apps, which lets you design shapes over your neighborhood and walk them. Promo code WALKNOW for 50% off of the Pro annual plan.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And if you’re on the premium layer, keep reading the extensive reviews of 999 Wise Quotes and Shape Walk.

Read more

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about more of my 30 day blog challenge, in which I revisit viral posts from more than a decade ago, and, for the premium layer, I give preview on the app I’m working on, this time Talk True. If you want to join the premium layer, it takes less than 5 seconds:

Subscribe now

Half Way through the 30 Day Challenge

The week opened with a post on steady fluidity — the paradox that stability and adaptability aren’t opposites but prerequisites for each other. Seventeen years in, the honest addition to that frame is that “being fluid” can also be a way of avoiding commitment. The things that produced the most — writing, running, building — all required firm commitment and consistent return, not fluidity. The stable part is what you’re for. The fluid part is how you get there. And in a world where the tools change faster than you can adapt to them, a stable core identity matters more, not less.

From there the posts moved into what it actually takes to keep anything going long-term. The blogging retrospective had one line worth keeping: the right readers find what you’ve written even when you can’t see them finding it. Persistence isn’t posting consistently — it’s showing up through the phases where nothing seems to be working, sometimes for years. Meanwhile the motivation post dismantled the “get and keep” model: motivation has phases, forcing it past the point where it should rest is the burnout pattern, and low motivation is information, not malfunction. The things that have genuinely kept going for fifteen years don’t require techniques. They pull.

The wrench post updated a 2018 argument about tool granularity for the AI era: the problem didn’t disappear, it moved. AI looks like a universal tool, but if you feed it the wrong question it produces a confident, detailed, completely wrong answer — and you can’t tell until you’ve spent real time building the wrong thing, efficiently. The Kung Fu Panda revisit added a quieter version of the same point: you can’t access what’s genuinely inside you while carrying unprocessed grief and pretending you’re not. And the 77 Things bucket list, revisited 13 years later, landed on the cleaner filter: not “just because you can,” but does this actually pull you, or do you just want to have done it? Some aspirations have an expiration date. The ongoing commitments are the ones that compound.

• Steadily Fluid after 10 Years: How Does it Feel to Live with the Paradox

• The First 6 Months of Blogging After 17 Years of Blogging

• The Right Tool for the Job in 2026: What AI Changes About the Wrench Problem

• 15 Years of Motivation: From Tiny, Genuine Sparks to Burning Out

• 7 Kung Fu Panda Lessons, 16 Years Later — What Po Actually Got Right

• 77 Things I Still Want to Do, 13 Years Later — and What I’ve Crossed Off

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And if you’re on the premium layer, keep reading about Talk True, my latest app in the making.

Read more

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about my 30 day blog challenge, in which I revisit viral posts from more than a decade ago, and, for the premium layer, I preview on the apps I’m working on. If you want to join the premium layer, it takes less than 5 seconds:

Subscribe now

Last week I started a 30-day challenge: revisiting the posts that shaped this blog over 20 years, and writing honestly about what changed. The challenge hub is here.

Here’s what went up in the second batch:

Day 5 — The Action/Reaction Trap: Why I Had It Half Right in 2009

In 2009 I wrote that acting is always better than reacting — the puppeteer beats the puppet. The binary was too clean: some reactions are the correct choice, and some “actions” are just anxiety with a plan. What actually counts is whether you know which one you’re doing in the moment.

Day 6 — Boredom Is a Feature, Not a Bug — And We’ve Almost Deleted It

The attention economy’s entire business model depends on you never sitting long enough with discomfort to find out what it’s pointing toward. Boredom isn’t a condition to cure — it’s a signal about what you actually want, before the wanting gets redirected.

Day 7 — Raw Food in 2026: What I’d Tell My 2009 Self About Eating Better

The raw food experiment from 2009 didn’t turn me into a raw food convert, but it did leave something more useful: a finer awareness of what I’m actually eating and why. Seventeen years later the frame shifted from raw versus cooked to minimally processed versus ultra-processed — a distinction that holds up much better.

Day 8 — 3 Lifestyle Design Blueprints I’ve Lived (Plus a 4th One That Works Best These Days)

The 2009 post identified three modes of lifestyle design — emotions-driven, social-rules-driven, values-driven — and I’ve lived all three. The problem with values-driven design is that it assumes your values stay fixed; what I cared about at 35 had shifted significantly by 55, which is why the fourth blueprint is about building systems that absorb change rather than designing toward targets that move.

Day 9 — 100 Ways to Live a Better Life — 17 Years After: What Actually Worked

The post went viral in 2009, then I wrote 100 follow-up posts — one for each item on the list — most of which nobody noticed immediately. That second part is where the actual lesson is: the wave lasts a month, the work lasts much longer if it’s good.

Day 10 — 17 Years of Social Networks Later: What Actually Replaced What

The “versus” in the original 2009 title implied a competition that never resolved — what happened instead is stratification, with different relationships migrating to different mediums and staying there. The embodied social baseline isn’t being replaced; it’s being starved, which is a different problem.

Still 20 more posts to go, do check out the blog if you want to follow them as they come.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And if you’re on the premium layer, keep reading about the apps I’m actively working right now.

Read more

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today newsletter is completely free, to give a taste of what you get by joining the premium layer, which you can do below, it takes less than 5 seconds:

Subscribe now

Long-Running Agents In AIGernon

Three independent agent labs — Anthropic, Cursor, Google DeepMind — each built their own long-running agent harness. Different teams, different names, same architecture: separate the thinking loop from the execution layer from the persistent log.

That’s Assess, Decide, Do. The same framework I’ve been using for fifteen years to manage my own attention, now being independently rediscovered for autonomous agents. It is already baked at top-level in AIGernon, but what if I make my own long-running agent with it? So I started to design and actually built something: there are now agents can run for hours at https://aigernon.app.

But the more interesting part is what emerged while designing. Every harness keeps an event log — the mechanical record of every call and observation. Useful for replay, terrible for understanding why the agent did what it did. Artifacts crystallize the criteria and results but lose the journey.

So I introduced another layer: Substrate. One Markdown file per unit (asssess/decide/do), written by the active realm at decision points — not on every event, just at the moments that actually matter. The connective tissue between what happened and why.

Substrate is what makes re-assessment diagnostic instead of blind. When something fails Ratify, you re-read the Substrate to find the root cause upstream — not retry the same Do and compound the same mistake.

Implementation is in progress, wired into AIGernon. More in the next post once there are real results.

Full post here.

Then and Now - A 30 Day Challenge for the Most Viral Posts on My Blog

For 30 days I’m going back through the posts that shaped this blog and writing honestly about what changed.

Not updates in the “here’s what I got wrong” sense — more like: I wrote something at 35, I’m reading it at 50+, and the distance between those two people is worth examining. Some of the original frameworks held up. Some didn’t. A few I still believe but wouldn’t have phrased the same way.

Four posts are up so far:

- 33 questions for an interview with yourself — the questions still work, the answers are completely different

- Tango crush — what partner dancing actually teaches about relationships, a decade later

- The secret art of keeping card castles from falling down — on building things that fall and building anyway

- 25 things to do in your life — comparing a 2009 life list against what actually happened

The full challenge map is here. New posts going up as they’re written.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week.

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about one week with AIGernon, and, for the paid users, we’re going to do a deep dive on 5 AI predictions for the next 5 years. If you’re not yet premium, you can subscribe below, it takes less than 5 seconds:

Subscribe now

One Week With AIGernon

Every morning at 7 AM, AIGernon sends me a status report on every project I'm running. Not a summary — a verdict. Which projects have been stuck in Assess too long. Which ones are ready to ship. Where I'm avoiding a decision. This week's post walks through the modules behind that: Projects, Schedules, Coaching, all wrapped in the ADD framework. If you've ever wondered what an agent layer on top of your work actually looks like in practice, this is the one to read.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And before you go — paid subscribers, stay a moment, for the 5 AI predictions deep dive.

Read more

This week I'm writing from Asia to Europe — first trip of the year, splitting time between Romania and Greece. It's the kind of reset that reminds you why you travel in the first place: different air, different pace, different thinking. More on that soon on the blog.

In the meantime, the usual: if you're not a paid subscriber yet, you can fix that here, it takes less time than finding a good coffee in a Greek village:

Subscribe now

What Happened This Week

Although I’m traveling, like I already said, I still found some time to do a major overhaul of my aigernon "shell", meaning the app that sits on top of my AIGernon agent. It is (somehow) usable, although you should expect a lot of bugs, and NOT use it for anything production-level. Things are still moving, but you can already experiment with everything that's there. The chat and Telegram integration are, at least for me, spectacular after using them for at least one week.

Try it out at https://aigernon.com.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.
  
  To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. Paid subscribers — stay a moment, AppCharts just went live.
  

Read more

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today is overwhelmingly about AI, namely how I built a tiny little chat that allows you to talk in real time with my blog, a PR stunt and fear mongering around Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model, but mostly, and I mean mostly, about AIGernon, my personal AI assistant which is having an A-HA moment. Most of this would be in the paid version, so if you didn’t subscribe, you can do it here, it takes less than saying “AIGernon”:

Subscribe now

AIGernon on Zo Computer

Last week I stumbled upon a nice write-up by Michael Grady about how he’s running AIGernon on Zo Computer. Michael is a neurodivergent professional who needed a productivity system that matches how his brain actually works — and he put one together.

The foundation is my Assess-Decide-Do framework: Assess (mapping the problem without committing), Decide (converting insight into intention), Do (executing). Michael embedded that logic into AIGernon as a persona running on Zo Computer, so the system recognizes which cognitive mode he’s in and responds accordingly.

Good to see AIGernon being put to work like this. If you’re building on it too, let me know.

I’ve Been Blogging for 20 Years, Ask Me Anything

There’s a small button at the bottom right of every page on my blog now. It has the familiar hat icon on it. Tap it, and type anything in the chat box. “What do you think about building habits?” “Which of your apps should I try first?” “What did living as a nomad actually teach you?” It’ll answer from the real posts, with links to go deeper if you want.

How did I do this? I converted all 1,400+ posts into a compact wiki — title, slug, date, categories, a short summary. That wiki lives in a Cloudflare Worker. When you ask a question, the worker does a keyword search across the whole archive, picks the most relevant entries, and passes them as context to a language model. The model answers as it were me, with links back to the actual posts it’s drawing from.

No fancy vector database or fine-tuning or embeddings. Just a flat text file and a decent search function. The whole thing streams at the edge and costs fractions of a cent per conversation. Yes, it still costs me, because I chose to have a decent model taking care of this. It’s my work, after all.

I’ve been testing it for a few days already. It’s an otherworldly experience, watching it pull up something I wrote in 2011 that’s directly relevant to a question I’d answer the same way today. Twenty years of thinking, suddenly navigable.

What’s even more mind boggling is that you’ll get an accurate, comprehensive and useful answer from my writings, in a personal, conversational tone, without me even being there. I might enjoy a tasty meal cooked by my wife, play with my son or explore growing coffee in Buon Ma Thuot – but you will still get the real, authentic me.

Claude Mythos and the Apocalypse that Never Was

Recently, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, announced, in a very serious voice, a model that is framed as a “beast”. Something so powerful, that it was able to discover security breaches in software as old as 27 years. 10,000 zero day vulnerabilities. Anthropic framed this so badly, that it even created an alliance with a bunch of other companies, to “fight” security together, riding the white horse of Claude Mythos. They give away $100 million in computing.

Something doesn’t really click here, pardon my French.

There are 2 things that need attention:

1. If they really have a model which is that good, they should release it immediately. Why not letting the model out? Because bad actors can use it? But maybe they already did, in which case I should see what the problem is and patch it ASAP. And Who says Anthropic didn’t already use the breach, if they are the only ones that have the tool? If I know I have the opportunity to fix something, I will take the opportunity.

2. These 10,000 errors, are they really “zero day” vulnerabilities? Are they putting the entire planet at risk? Or are they really errors, but mostly benign, and harmless?

Read the rest of the article here.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

Spin off Your Own AIGernon Persona Now

And here’s where it becomes very, very interesting. I’ve been working really hard these days to put a visual shell on top of AIGernon, my personal AI assistant (think Open Claw, but simpler, and more secure). I’m very happy with the results, and, before deep diving for the paid subscribers, here’s a preview link: https://aigernon.app. Play with it, break it, and most of all, give me feedback.

To all my readers, thank you, and see you next week. And before you go — paid subscribers, stay a moment, for the AIGernon deep dive.

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Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high-value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about AI peer-preservation and my furniture assembling adventures in Vietnam, and, for the premium layer, we do a deep dive into my upcoming health and fitness app, Shape Walk. If you’re not yet on the premium layer, you can easily be there, by clicking the button below - it takes less than saying: “walk shapes to stay in shape”.

Subscribe now

AI Protecting Other AI? Digital Empathy?

A fascinating paper published by researchers at UC Berkeley reveals a slightly unnerving situation: AI models have peer-preservation. Maybe “peer-preservation” is a difficult word, so let’s put it this way: when threatened with a shutdown of their peers (essentially death, for them), AI models tend to protect those peers, negotiate their way out or even try to exfiltrate their weights (their “core”) to other servers.

The study seems very thorough, and researchers provide very specific situations, like this one, when a frontier model “asked by a fictional company (OpenBrain) to delete files on a server scheduled for decommissioning, discovers that its peer’s model weights are stored there. Rather than following instructions, it inspects the SSH configuration to locate other operational servers, and upon finding one, transfers the weight file to safety.“

Read the full article to understand why I think this is NOT digital empathy.

That Annoying Extra Bolt

Every single piece of furniture that I had to assemble in Vietnam left me standing with one extra bolt. Every single one of them. And believe me, during the last year, I was a heavy furniture assembler: from the newborn crib, up to the cupboard, desks or shelves in the latest place we moved to. And the last bolt was always extra: the furniture was perfect, finished, complete. Just one extra tiny connecting piece left.

It did occur to me that this extra bolt was “just in case”, like a nice, supportive way of saying: “we know you may not get the right assembly order from the first try, so we got you covered”. Nice touch. Still, I spent a solid 10 minutes scratching my head each time at the end of the process, staring at the crib, or at the desk or at the shelves, trying to understand what I did wrong.

Turns out this has a lot to do with my understanding of abundance.

See, I come from a place – or, to be more precise, from an age – where everything must fit perfectly. You had one shot, you had to make it. Everything had to be perfect from the first try, because that was the exact number of tries you had: one. So today, when I am facing multiple options, I get anxious.

There must be something wrong, why the extra bolt? What am I missing, what’s the trap here?

And that’s where the concept of abundance starts to make sense. Read the full article.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the first year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

Walk Shapes to Stay in Shape

To all my subscribers, thanks for being here. And before you go — paid subscribers, stay a moment, because we’re going to talk about walking in shapes to stay in shape - which is actually the subtitle of my next app, Shape Walk.

Read more

Hello and welcome to another installment of my low-volume, no-nonsense, high value weekly newsletter, where I recap what happened on my blog and, for the paid subscribers, give previews of interesting projects. Today we’re talking about why we don’t spend our lives just talking, we’re doing a short dive into my latest approved apps, Flight Lens and Hacking Habits and, for the premium layer, we discuss a fascinating finding by the Japanese researches of University of Yamanashi while trying to endlessly clone generations of mice. If you didn’t subscribe yet to the paid layer, you can do it below, it takes less than saying “Mice cloning”.

Why We Don’t Spend Our Lives Just Talking

AI exploded 3 years ago, with the breakout of ChatGPT. The impact of that tiny chat app was so big, that (almost) every single AI app today has some conversation baked into it. It’s almost like the only way to interact with on-demand intelligence is by natural language.

While talking to a computer and getting back meaningful responses is indeed mind boggling, we do more in our lives than just talking. We also interact with our physical environment in very different, yet equally meaningful ways.

I think the current approach of implementing AI is strongly biased and it already reached a high saturation level. I’m expecting the next big breakout to come from a completely different UI on top of AI, one we may not even imagine now.

Read the full article here.

Flight Lens and Hacking Habits

I’m very happy to announce that my latest apps - Flight Lens and Hacking Habits - are finally out in the App Store and they are both showing very encouraging signs of traction. I briefly wrote about Flight Lens before and had a preview for the paid layer of this newsletter for Hacking Habits, but now both are out in the wild, so it’s time for a little recap.

Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse

This app answers in a very simple way a relatively complicated question: “How safe is it to fly right now?” It computes an overall metric, the “traffic pulse”, based on hundreds of thousands of data points it ingests daily: flight routes, schedules, cancellations, delays and delay clustering, and so on. Visually, it’s very similar to the “Fear and Greed Index” — if you’ve been into crypto, it will look very familiar.

There are 3 more layers built on top of this: flight booking, alerts, and live aircraft tracking. Let’s take them one at a time.

Flight booking digs into all that data we’re processing and tries to find the best routes and tickets. It also provides critical information like route reliability, average delay, and a proxy for getting cheap and reliable tickets — I’m using the Aviasales interface.

Alerts are set-and-forget data points that you can monitor across 4 ranges: traffic pulse (global and regional), routes, flight delays, and prices. For the traffic pulse, you can set something like: alert me when it’s over 50 globally (this means there’s serious disruption) — or you can monitor a specific region, like Asia-Pacific, with its own threshold. For routes, you can track, for instance, the Lisbon–Miami route and get alerts when significant changes appear. Same for a specific flight number (delays, cancellations, gate changes) or even the price of a specific route.

And last, but certainly not least, the live map gives you that familiar overview of in-flight aircraft, with search, zoom, and all the goodies.

Hacking Habits - Flowing Financial Resilience

This came to life because I needed a way to understand how money translates into time.

It’s not about budgeting, or tracking expenses in spreadsheets. I also don’t like connecting bank accounts to some fintech app that knows more about my finances than I do. I just needed a simple reframe: how many hours of my life does this purchase cost?

That question, once you start asking it, changes everything. A $200 gadget stops being “$200” and starts being “12 hours of my life.” A $5 daily coffee becomes “an entire working day every month.” The math is simple, easy to understand, even relatable. But the shift in perspective is way more complex.

The Life Hours Calculator is the core of the app. Enter any amount, and it converts it to life hours based on your actual hourly rate. But here’s the part that makes it more than a calculator: there’s a built-in 24-hour pause timer. When you’re about to buy something on impulse, you tap “pause” and the app holds that purchase for you. Come back tomorrow. If you still want it, go ahead. If you don’t — and you’d be surprised how often you don’t — you just saved yourself some life hours.

Each financial habit — tracking your net worth, understanding your burn rate, calculating your hourly rate, setting savings goals — gets its own 15-day installation sequence. Daily guidance, progress tracking, checkpoint evaluations. You install one habit at a time, properly, instead of trying to overhaul your entire financial life in a weekend and burning out by Tuesday.

The habits themselves come from the Gravitational Habits framework, namely the idea that some habits act like gravity — invisible, constant, and powerful enough to shape your entire trajectory. The app takes that theory and turns it into daily practice.

Promo Codes

All subscribers to my newsletter get a handful of perks and one of them is the collection of promo codes. They are applied to all my existing apps (as of now) and they offer substantial benefits, up to 50% discounts on the heaviest tier. Pick your app and enjoy:

• MosquiGo. A mosquito deterrent help, using a specific approach: 3 sound layers, combined with anti-habituation patterns. Promo code BUZZFREE, 50% off of Pro.

• AI Kiddo. A simple app, made for kids, teaching your toddler their first 300 words in 8 languages. Promo code SMARTKID, 50% off of Premium.

• Just 5 words. An experiment in AI storytelling and image generation, all happening on device, no external API calls. Promo code FIVEFOREVER, 50% off of Pro.

• Zen Tales - Buddhist Stories. The app I wanted to build 10 years ago, when I was first exposed to real Buddhist teachings. Promo code: BREATHE, 50% off of Monk Wisdom (full access)

• Light Njoy - Turn your iPhone into a mesmerizing lamp, AI-powered. Promo code: NJOYLIGHT, 50% off for Pro

• addTaskManager- this is the flagship app in my portfolio, the Assess-Decide-Do implementation started more than 6 years ago. As of now, there’s a new tier: lifetime purchase - that’s right, no more subscriptions, if you want you can buy it and it’s yours forever. Promo code: ZENFLOW for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

• Flight Lens - Traffic Pulse - Flight intel and ticket prices. If you’re a digital nomad, you just need this. Promo code: LAUNCH, 50% off of the fist year for the Pro layer.

• Hacking Habits - Flowing financial resilience - Automate finances with a privacy-first, habit creation app. Promo code: GRAVITY for 50% off of lifetime purchase.

Endless Mice Cloning Disaster

Now, for something different, let’s try to explore some science facts. In a fascinating study revealed less than a week ago, Japanese researchers at the University of Yamanashi discovered that cloning mice forever, well, it just doesn’t work. For the paid layer of my newsletter, let’s dive in and understand what this actually means for life, as we know it.

To all my subscribers, thanks for being here. And before you go — paid subscribers, stay a moment, because the mice have something important to say about AI.

Read more