Tools

I recently needed to understand a long, cross-departmental process. It was documented across a huge slide deck, a few forms, and half a dozen fields scattered across internal systems. No single source of truth. In my experience, the right tool for this is a checklist. Not a dashboard, not an assistant. Just a simple list of boxes to check in the right order. So I used Claude to read through the materials and produce a tight summary of the process and its steps. I reviewed it, then asked Claude to turn that summary into a checklist draft. I refined it. I’m using it now, and I’ll keep refining it as I go. ...

Playing around with Dragon 32 code this week pulled me straight back into the 80s. That reminded me that some time ago I implemented SpaceMonger, a tiny retro space game where you fight spiders and collect coins. So I revived it and, at the same time, tested Google’s new Antigravity. You can see the result on my Projects page (Warning: it is addictive.) As for Antigravity? A disappointment. It works if you want something free while learning vibecoding, but it is not close to Cursor and very far from Claude. The ultimate humiliation was opening Claude inside Antigravity to fix bugs Antigravity could not handle. ...

A Fool with a Tool Long ago, I met a senior executive from NBC who liked to say: “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” It was true then, when the “tools” were spreadsheets, automation scripts, or a shiny new CRM. It’s even truer today, when the tools in question are large language models and autonomous agents. Over the past year, AI has moved from novelty to necessity. The experiments are over; the adoption curve has turned vertical. ...