How I use a BlackOps brain to track my deploys
I asked BlackOps for a brain called Deployment Log, backfilled 34 deploys into it out of the build logs, and it caught a failed build I had never recorded plus a fix I had already made too narrowly.
Ben Newton - Commerce Frontend Specialist Blog
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Claude's Watermark Has a Shelf Life
Claude's new text watermark marks assistance, not authorship. As assisted writing becomes universal, the signal loses its power to distinguish anything.
Slop Is What Falls Out When Nobody's Steering
Medium won't build AI detection. The real question was never who typed it. It was whether anyone was minding the output.
The Work Starts When the Thought Does
How an autonomous SDLC built on notes, one MCP server, and an Obsidian vault turns a spoken idea into a merged pull request while you're at work.
I Walked Up to Doc Holliday's Grave. Here Is Everything That Happened After.
Logging a 2.6 mile walk to Doc Holliday's grave from a phone: HealthKit data, a corrected duration, a branded card, and a markdown file I own.
Everything Important I Built This Year Started Away From My Desk
A year in review: VoiceCommit born on a California trail, BlackOps built from staycations, a blog post written inside Magic Kingdom, and Spotter's three-build weekend sparked by an email read on vacation.
A stranger took my beta app to the gym and found the bug I couldn't
A retired engineer testing my workout app at a university gym found a data loss bug my own testing never hit. How I built the offline queue that fixed it, shipped in a weekend.
Everyone's Fishing Off the Same Boat
Most X growth tools farm the same recycled replies. I built one that answers from your own second brain, so you sound like you, not the boat.
How I Use BlackOps to Reply on X Without the AI Slop
Reply-guy culture says volume wins. I run each Hunt as a live search on X; BlackOps scores the results, drafts only the replies that stand on something I actually wrote, and I send every one myself.
A Year Into Wispr Flow, I Can't Work Without It Anymore
A year of Wispr Flow voice dictation changed how I write, message, and brief AI agents, and why I won't go back.
Fifteen Minutes From Content Idea to Published Carousel
How a content idea became a written LinkedIn post, a designed carousel, and this blog post itself, all in one 15-minute chat session.
The Least Friction Between You and Your Early Users
Add a low-friction voice feedback widget to your app or site so early users can tell you what is broken by talking, and have your agent wire it in.
My Workout System Is an iPhone App Now. Claude and I Built It in a Day.
I was avoiding Claude Fable 5 so July 7 couldn't disappoint me. Then it turned my workout-tracking blog post into Spotter, a real iOS app with an AI coach, in one day. TestFlight beta open.
I've Been Wondering About a Plane for 40+ Years. Claude Found It, and Now I'm Logging All of Them.
I wondered about a Pan Am 747 for 40 years. Claude found the exact tail number. Now I log every flight in BlackOps so the answers never scroll away.
Tracking My Wine Taste Until It Knew My Next Bottle
I stopped keeping wine notes and built a Brain that learns my palate. Here is what happened when it watched me buy a bottle, and why a model beats a notebook.
The More AI Changes How We Work, The More It Stays The Same
A reaction to five predictions about AI token economics, and why none of it changes the underlying work. Same problems, new vocabulary.
Replace Yourself Before Someone Else Does
Everyone asks if AI will replace them. The better move: replace yourself on purpose. What I automated, the numbers behind it, and the playbook to start.
Every Platform You Publish On Is a Rental
Lock-in is what makes enshittification work. Here's the mechanism, and the export button that lets you take your whole site and go.
I Spent Years Automating My Obsidian Daily Note. Now It Files Itself.
For years I hand-automated my Obsidian daily note. Now it fills itself. An agent files my captures overnight, sorts thoughts from tasks, and surfaces what's next by morning.
I Couldn't Finish a Blog Post for Twenty Years. So I Built BlackOps.
Hundreds of unfinished drafts in twenty years. Forty-five published in five months. This is what BlackOps is, where it came from, and the proof it works.
BlackOps Kept Giving Me the Same SEO Advice Every Week. So I Gave It a Memory.
Why stateless analytics tools give the same advice forever, and how a recommendation ledger plus delta injection made my AI assistant actually track progress per site.
I Ran a Full SEO Audit Without Opening a Browser. Here Is What Happened.
I audited my site's search performance, rewrote two title tags, and pushed the fixes live without opening Search Console once. The whole thing ran in one chat.
I Don't Open Analytics Anymore. I Just Ask.
Every BlackOps-hosted site is posts, pages, and newsletter signups. So instead of opening a dashboard, you just ask your site how it's doing. The interesting part is that everyone asks it something different.
I Track Every Workout By Talking To My Phone. Here Is The System.
How I use Claude skills, BlackOps brains, and Apple HealthKit to log every workout by voice. No app. No spreadsheet. No data entry. Just dictate a set and walk to the next machine.
Sorties: Fire Real Actions Straight From Your AI Chat
Sorties turn one chat message into a real action. Fix a bug, message your team, fire a Zapier automation. Set it up once, fire it by name from anywhere.
Your Obsidian Vault Is Full of Fossils.
If you use Obsidian, you have a daily note ritual. Open today's note. Pull up yesterday's. Copy the unfinished tasks forward. The daily note is supposed to be a living document. In practice, it's a stack of fossils you maintain by hand.
My MCP Went Down Today. I Don't Want To Care About Infrastructure.
Google Cloud blocked Railway's account. BlackOps MCP went dark. I don't want to care about infrastructure, but the infrastructure doesn't care what I want.
Claude Code Is Not Your Project Manager. The Artifacts Are.
A markdown file got me started. Infrastructure is what it became. The year-later upgrade: Claude manages a living knowledge base, files its own bugs, and pitches its own features. One pattern, three implementations.
They Booed AI at Graduation. I Get It. They're Still Wrong.
UCF arts graduates booed a commencement speaker for praising AI. The fear is real. But blocking it out is the worst possible move. Here's the formula the adapters are already running.
The agent is the buyer now. Your checkout isn't ready.
Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol, ChatGPT Instant Checkout, and Perplexity shopping are live. Retail leaders still hiding catalogs behind login walls are losing transactions they can't see.
Signup is dead. The agent is the signup form now.
From npx to a live post in ten minutes. No forms, no empty dashboard.
Personal Second Brains Are Step One. Operational Second Brains Are The Actual Destination.
Personal second brains help you think. Operational second brains run a business. Five places that wall shows up, and what changes when the architecture has to publish.
Coinbase Founder Just Validated What I've Been Saying for Months
Brian Armstrong announced one-person teams running fleets of AI agents at Coinbase. I wrote this playbook months ago. Here's what it actually looks like in practice.
Why Your Best Work Gets 200 Views While Slop Gets 4.8 Million
The platform math that rewards repackaging over judgment, and why practitioners who ship real work win long-term anyway. A breakdown of urgency loops, borrowed authority, and the structural bet against content slop.
I Killed the Browser Workflow for Content Creation. My Readers Still Live in Browsers.
Salesforce killed the browser for data access. BlackOps kills the browser workflow for creators. Your content lives in browsers. Your work happens in Claude.
From It's a Small World to the Haunted Mansion: A Blog Post Written in Claude Chat via BlackOps MCP
Obsidian CEO kepano shipped official Claude Code skills. Here's the practitioner take on what composable vault architecture actually looks like — from someone already running 8 custom skills.
Google Analytics in Claude: Query GA4 Without Leaving the Chat
How I added GA4 query tools to my MCP server so analytics, drafting, and iteration all live in the same chat surface.
The Algorithm Just Told Me You All Use the Same Tool
The X algorithm is serving up identical posts from different accounts. Same tool, same tells. Here's why practitioners scroll past and what AI should actually do.
Einstein Didn't Remember the Speed of Light
Einstein famously said he didn't bother remembering things he could look up. Thirty years into this career, I think I finally understand what he meant.
The Knowledge I Lost (And How You Won't)
30 years of hard-won engineering experience, gone. Here's why the next generation won't have the same regret.
Gary Vee Was Right. The Execution Layer Was Missing.
Gary Vee told business owners to post on 8 platforms every day. The advice is right. But advice without infrastructure is just motivation. Here is how I built the execution layer.
I Was Trying to Buy a Truck. I Accidentally Discovered the Future of Note-Taking.
How a Sunday truck research session revealed something I hadn't designed into BlackOps: the end of note-taking as we know it.
Stop Giving Claude a Static Doc. Give It a Brain.
Brain compiles any Obsidian folder into a living knowledge base every agent can read and update. Claude Projects, Claude Code, Cowork. No RAG. No scripts. No stale context.
You Don't Have a Brand Problem. You Have a Systems Problem.
Joanna Wiebe broke down 6 psychology principles behind personal brands that convert. Every single one is a systems problem — and BlackOps solves all 6.
Everyone's Mad Anthropic Killed OpenClaw Access. I'm Not.
I spent a month debugging OpenClaw every morning before coming back to Claude Code. The people crying loudest about Anthropic's decision aren't the ones who were actually using it to get work done.
I Watched a YouTube Video. Claude Wrote This Post.
BlackOps has an MCP server. That means Claude can draft, queue, and publish your content directly from a conversation. Here's what that looks like in practice.
The Future of Writing Is AI-Assisted. Not AI-Generated
I am certain that AI writing assistance is going to be the norm soon
Two Waves of Digital Transformation. Developers Win Both.
AI is replacing workers and consumers alike. The first wave digitized the back office. The second is removing humans from both sides of the transaction. Here's why developers should be optimistic about all of it.
Stop Hiring Cooks. Start Building Kitchens.
Everyone says "we can use AI for that." But reliable, repeatable AI requires infrastructure. Here's why developers need to build the kitchen, not just hire the cook.
I Published an MCP for BlackOps Center. Here’s What It Actually Enables.
The BlackOps MCP connects Claude directly to your content system. Here's how to use it to write posts, tweet threads, and run campaigns.