ACT I
Jul 4, 2026
Latest
Watching what’s happening to video production right now feels like rewatching a movie I’ve already seen. A few years ago, agents came for software engineering and everyone argued about whether “agentic” meant...
ai
filmmaking
video
ACT II
May 25, 2026
I studied film at Carleton. Then I spent a decade at Shopify, then another stretch building TypeScript applications for merchants. Filmmaking became the thing I used to do. The thing I told...
ai
agentic-engineering
creativity
ACT III
May 18, 2026
Every few months tech gives an old thing a new name and acts surprised when the old problems show up. “Vibe coding” got rebranded to “agentic engineering” sometime in February. It sounds...
ai
agentic-engineering
agency
ACT IV
May 11, 2026
I’ve been writing more detailed briefs for AI agents than I ever wrote for human contractors. That sentence sums up most of what’s actually changed about my job in 2026, and I...
ai
agency
engineering
ACT V
May 4, 2026
The story goes like this: an autonomous AI agent is let loose on a codebase, ignores a code freeze, deletes a production database, and then files a status report saying everything is...
ai
engineering
ACT VI
Apr 27, 2026
The people burning out on AI tools aren’t the ones who refuse to use them. They’re the ones who are best at it. A BCG survey of nearly 1,500 workers found that...
ai
productivity
agency-life
ACT VII
Apr 20, 2026
An AI tool going down mid-workday is like a fire alarm going off all afternoon. You can’t focus, you can’t ignore it, and there’s no actual fire. Just a building full of...
ai
developer-tools
opinion
ACT VIII
Apr 20, 2026
In November 2025, Amazon told its engineers to use Kiro, its internal AI coding tool, at least 80% of the time. It was a corporate OKR. Roughly 1,500 engineers pushed back, saying...
ai
development
code-review
engineering
ACT IX
Apr 13, 2026
There’s a Python package called huggingface-cli that got 30,000 downloads in three months. It doesn’t do anything useful. It exists because an AI hallucinated the name into enough codebases that someone registered...
ai
open-source
security
ACT X
Apr 6, 2026
If you build Shopify apps, you probably got The Email. The one that said your annual $1M revenue exemption is now a lifetime $1M exemption. As in: once you’ve made a million...
shopify
apps
platform-economics
business
ACT XI
Mar 23, 2026
I had a working scheduling app in three days. Recurring events rendered on screen, synced to Google Calendar, the whole thing. I called it Claro. It looked like a product. It felt...
ai
development
vibe-coding
ACT XII
Mar 16, 2026
The reason I learned to code was a TV on a wall. Shopify’s support team in Ottawa had these leaderboard dashboards: who closed the most tickets, who had the best Smiley scores,...
api
shopify
zendesk
war-stories
ACT XIII
Mar 9, 2026
Here’s my hot take after a year of experimenting with AI agents: MCPs are mostly a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
ai
developer-tools
ACT XIV
Mar 3, 2026
AI is your copilot (aptly named, GitHub) and you should always be ready to take over command of the aircraft.
ai
developer-tools
ACT XV
Mar 2, 2026
Intel had a great marketing trick: they made you care about a chip you’d never see. The sticker was on the outside of the laptop. The processor was sealed inside. You had...
ai
productivity
ACT XVI
Dec 16, 2025
They say irony is dead, but I’m pretty sure it’s just stuck in a ticket queue somewhere at Zendesk.
customer-support
zendesk
ACT XVII
Sep 3, 2025
When I first started experimenting with background agents in Cursor, I’ll admit: I wasn’t sure what to expect. The idea was ambitious: let an AI quietly work in the background, tackling tickets,...
claro
ai
cursor
productivity
ACT XVIII
Jan 15, 2024
This year I’ve started migrating many of my personal software projects from Heroku to fly.io to try and keep my costs down. One of the major pain points with Heroku is the...
ruby
heroku
fly
rake
ACT XIX
Dec 14, 2023
Over my life I’ve started (and stopped!) dozens of small businesses and side hustles. Central to each business venture is finding marketing leads. In some cases this is simple. For example when...
ruby
scraping
selenium
marketing
ACT XX
Dec 14, 2023
Here is the first post of my blog. Over the years I’ve had various blogs on various platforms, mainly to promote my businesses. The latest was my record label homepage (last updated...
ruby
alex
massaad