Thoughts & Perspectives
Building in public
AI for CEOs: What to Do Yourself, What to Delegate, and What to Refuse (2026)
The CEO's job with AI is not to become the best prompt writer in the building. It's to use it personally on the six things only you do, delegate the three things that scale, refuse the three that don't, and write a one-page policy so everyone else can move. Here's the weekly routine I run and install.
AI for Executives: The Five Decisions That Are Yours, and the Twenty That Aren't (2026)
Executives don't need to learn AI. They need to make five decisions about it: what to fund, what to refuse, who owns it, what the board gets told, and what 'we use AI' means in the P&L. Everything else belongs to the people who run the workflows. A fractional CTO's version of the executive AI briefing, without the slide deck.
AI for Leaders: Your Job Is the Decisions, Not the Prompts (2026)
Leaders keep asking which AI tool to learn. Wrong question. Your job is deciding what the company uses AI for, what it never uses it for, how work gets re-scoped when a task drops from days to minutes, and how you judge output you can no longer produce yourself. The decision rules, the meeting habits, and what to stop measuring.
AI for Managers: How to Actually Use It, What to Hand Your Team, and What to Refuse (2026)
A manager's AI job is not prompting. It's deciding which of your team's tasks AI takes, setting the review standard for what comes back, and re-scoping people's work when a two-day task becomes a twenty-minute one. Here is the weekly practice, the tools that matter, and the mistakes I watch managers make.
Vercel vs Netlify in 2026: Netlify Meters Usage, Vercel Meters People, and Only One Free Plan Allows a Business
Vercel charges $20 per developer and gives you generous usage. Netlify charges $20 flat for unlimited developers and gives you 3,000 credits to spend. Vercel's free plan bans commercial use; Netlify's free plan just runs out. Which one you want depends on whether your constraint is people or traffic — and on whether you're shipping Next.js.
Is Render Free? The 15-Minute Sleep, the 30-Day Database Clock, and the robots.txt Nobody Mentions (2026)
Yes — Render has a genuinely free tier with no time limit and no card. It is also engineered to be unusable for a business: services sleep after 15 idle minutes, the free Postgres deletes itself after 30 days, and while your site is asleep it serves Google a disallow-all robots.txt. What free covers, what it quietly costs, and when to pay the $7.
Anthropic API Pricing (2026): Every Claude Model Per Million Tokens, and What a Real Workload Costs
As of September 2026: Opus 5.5 $4 in / $20 out per million tokens (launched September 22), Sonnet 5 $2 / $10, Haiku 4.5 $1 / $5, Fable 5.1 $10 / $50, cache hits at 10% of input on most models, Batch API half price. The rate table is the easy part. What three real workloads cost, the tokenizer change that quietly inflates bills, and the price cut Anthropic made permanent.
How to Vibe Code in 2026: The 7-Step Method I Hand Founders Before They Need a Rescue
Pick one tool, write one page before you prompt, build one feature at a time, and put a hard gate in front of payments and personal data. The seven steps I give founders, the three beginner mistakes that cause most of my rescue work, and the project ideas actually worth building first.
Is Qwen Free? What $0 Gets You in 2026 (and What Alibaba Quietly Ended in April)
Yes — Qwen Chat is free with no paid consumer tier at all, and the open-weights models are free to run yourself. What ended in April 2026 was the free developer API, replaced by a one-time 70-million-token trial. What free covers, what the API costs, and the data question a US business should ask first.
How to Use Claude Skills: The 20-Minute Setup That Stops You Re-Explaining Your Business (2026)
A Claude Skill is a folder with a SKILL.md file: a description that tells Claude when to use it, and instructions it follows when it does. Here's how to write one, where it lives in Claude Code and Claude.ai, how Claude decides to load it, and the three skills every business owner should build first.
Is Vercel Free? What the Hobby Plan Covers, and the Clause That Ends It (2026)
Yes — Vercel's Hobby plan is free, generous, and permanent. The meter isn't bandwidth, it's a sentence in the fair-use policy: personal, non-commercial use only. The moment your app makes anyone money, you're on Pro at $20 a seat. What free covers, what pauses it, and when to leave.
Base44 vs Replit (2026): Which One Should You Actually Build On?
Base44 vs Replit is not a fair fight — they are two different bets. Base44 is a managed app builder ($16-$80/mo, your data lives on their stack). Replit is a cloud IDE with a metered coding agent ($25/mo plus credits, real code you own). Which bet fits which founder, with 2026 prices.
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