Signal Over Noise Vol 2, Issue 17 | Apr 29 2026You Can't Cost-Reduce Yourself to Greatness I caught a Seth Godin interview at the beginning of the week and one line in particular caught my attention. He said “you can’t cost-reduce yourself to greatness,” and it stuck because it named something we’ve all been watching happen without quite having the words for it. There is a story being told about AI right now, which is this: AI is here to make your existing work cheaper. Fewer people, lower...
2 days ago • 5 min read
Second Brain Chronicles Vol 1, Issue 8 | April 28 2026 - Agents With Opinions The thing I keep noticing is that agents have stopped being passive. The ones I work with can disagree with me, the ones I don’t know about can target me, and the platform that holds the whole arrangement together is now substantial enough to recap. Three recent posts that all turned out to be the same conversation from different angles. Cerebro Recap, Six Months In I’ve been quietly building a second brain since...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Signal Over Noise Vol 2, Issue 16 | Apr 22 2026You don't need more AI tools. You need a better fit. Last Friday, Maya and I spent an hour delivering a post-lunch workshop with about thirty-five people at the GenAI Summit in Valencia. The room was a real mix: people from enterprise, people running on their own, designers, accountants, fractional CTOs, consultants. Languages went in and out of English across conversations. Most had used ChatGPT or Claude for something real. Hardly any had built...
9 days ago • 8 min read
Signal Over Noise Vol 2, Issue 15 | Apr 15 2026Ask Your AI To Ask You Questions Last Saturday morning I sat down to write the weekly digest for my build-log site — seven posts from the week to thread into a single email. I did what I’d been doing for months: described the week to Claude, asked for a draft, waited. It came back voice-aligned. The phrasing read like me but it just wasn’t hitting the mark. It was too technical, and not personal enough. I hadn’t dug into what the actual details...
16 days ago • 5 min read
Second Brain Chronicles Vol 1, Issue 7 | April 11 2026 - Tools That Build Themselves This past week, almost every post I wrote turned out to be one of two things: leftover hardware or unfinished work from a project that closed down — Spain AI Kit out of MyCityZen, the LoRa radio out of Remote Resilience Hub, the cat rescue volunteer site I’ve been carrying for two years — or me asking my tools what’s possible given the setup I already have (the bumper, the Cloudflare migration, the moment my...
20 days ago • 4 min read
Vol 2, Issue 14 | Apr 08 2026What about everything we learned? (Free Edition) Hey there, What about everything we learned? Last week we sent the shutdown email for MyCityZen. It was a small product, but there was nothing small about what sat underneath it. On the surface it looked like a chatbot — you asked a question, it answered — but the thing doing the answering was a routing layer over nearly thirty specialist agents, each one stitched to a knowledge base that a few hundred expats and...
23 days ago • 4 min read
Second Brain Chronicles Vol 1, Issue 6 | April 3 2026 - Tools That Build Themselves Dear Reader, You know the moment. You’re mid-session with your AI co-pilot, doing something for the second time, and you think: I did this exact thing last week. Most people treat tool-building as a separate activity. You sit down, spec out requirements, plan an interface, write the code. That works for big things. But the tools I reach for every day weren’t born that way. They grew out of friction I noticed...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, MyCityZen is shutting down at the end of this week. I wanted to reach out personally because you were one of the people who tried it, and that matters to me. The honest version: it was an experiment in using AI to help people navigate the chaos of relocating to Spain. The technology worked, but the timing wasn't right to keep it running as a standalone product. The knowledge isn't disappearing. Everything we built — the legal research, government data connections, bureaucracy...
30 days ago • 1 min read
Vol 2, Issue 13 | Apr 01 2026Are your tools deciding how you think? (Free Edition) Hey there, Are your tools deciding how you think? Your CRM shows you a flat list. Your project tracker shows you a board. Your analytics tool shows you a chart. For each one of those instances, someone else likely chose a single way to present your data, and you’ve probably been adapting your thinking to fit that choice ever since. But what if you could build your own view in thirty minutes? A friend of mine...
30 days ago • 3 min read
