Writing

Essays, playbooks, and measured findings on building with AI, running agencies, and how work actually gets done - plus personal stories and the opinions I will defend. Much of it published here first, and all of it open.

September 4, 20268 min read

What to Automate First in Your Agency

Agency AI pilots die in a drawer because the task was chosen by excitement instead of by fit. The right first automation is almost never the most impressive one. It is the most repeatable one, and repeatability can be scored. This is the triage I run before any agency automation project: where the candidates hide, six criteria to score them, and the pilot rules that keep the winner alive. Automate the work around the craft, never the craft.

ai-systemsagency-operatingplaybook

August 28, 202610 min read

You Ran the Audit. Now Fix What It Found.

The audit tells you what is broken. This is the file that fixes it: a stack-agnostic instruction you hand to an AI coding agent or a developer, covering rendering, head tags, previews, schema, machine files, and the content structures that get quoted rather than just read. Published whole, no email gate.

ai-systemsplaybooks

August 21, 20268 min read

The AI Quality Bar

Marketers credit AI with raising the quality of their output, and in the same breath name AI slop as their biggest fear. Both instincts are right, because they describe the same tool with and without a quality system around it. This is the quality system: how the four failure modes differ, the five checks that catch them, and why review stopped being the tax on production and became the product.

ai-systemsagencyplaybook

August 13, 20267 min read

How to Audit Your Own LinkedIn, Properly

Every LinkedIn analytics export is capped at fifty posts. Ask for a year and you quietly get only your best fifty, which inflates every average you compute. Ask month by month and you get everything. That is step one of eight, and the rest is joining data LinkedIn keeps in separate places so it can answer questions the dashboard cannot.

playbookagency-operating

August 10, 20268 min read

You Fixed the Site. Now Tell the Engines It Exists.

A readable site is not a found site. After the technical work is done, there is a short list of things that happen on Google's and Bing's own consoles, not in your codebase - and one of them needs no account, no API key, and takes about twenty minutes to wire in permanently. Here is the whole list, and what to actually read once it is running.

ai-systemsseo

July 14, 202614 min read

Remote MCP Server Build Playbook

A standalone recipe for building a remote MCP server that Claude.ai connects to over OAuth: architecture, Auth0 setup, the security isolation pattern, tool design, deployment, and testing. Hostnames, ports, and credentials are placeholders - swap in your own.

ai-systemsmcpplaybook

July 10, 20268 min read

Is Your Website Invisible to AI? The VISIBLE-7 Audit

A website can look perfect in your browser and be empty to the machines that increasingly decide who finds you. This is the audit I run on every site: seven areas, each with a test you can do right now, ordered by how much damage failing it causes. Free tools, small fixes, no SEO agency required.

ai-visibilityplaybooksseo

July 7, 20267 min read

The Handover Pack

Somewhere right now, a business owner is discovering that their website's hosting is registered to an agency that no longer answers email, and nobody knows the CMS admin password. This playbook is about being the vendor after whom that story is impossible. It costs you almost nothing. It is worth more than most portfolios.

agencyhandoverplaybook

July 1, 20268 min read

How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn profiles are mostly written like résumés: a list of jobs, read from the owner's point of view. The profiles that generate opportunities are written like landing pages, built around one clear message and read from the visitor's point of view. This is the guide I wrote after rebuilding my own, section by section, in the order visitors actually see things.

careerguides

June 24, 20267 min read

MCP for Business Owners

MCP is the least-explained important thing in AI right now: developers talk about it constantly, buyers hear the acronym and glaze over, and almost nobody has written the version for the person who signs the budget. This is that version.

ai-systemsmcpplaybook

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I write regularly on LinkedIn about what I'm building and learning: agency growth, AI development, product judgment, and the messy reality behind making things work.

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