Hi 👋🏼 I'm Olek, an AI Product Manager. Here I write about what matters to me. On the side I build GribGrab and MarrowMinded. I'm also a co-founder of 2 kids 👨👩, married happily 💍, and 🍕 lover.
Three Widgets I Built for the Vivaldi Dashboard Vivaldi's Dashboard takes Webpage widgets : a small web view pointing at any URL. No store, no install, no manifest, no review queue. If you can paste a link, you can add a widget. That's a low enough bar that I built three, out of things I already run. How to add one Open a new tab to get the Start Page, then switch to Dashboard . Click Add Widget…
Check That Cheaper One More from You Can Do Better — small product decisions that cancel out what the product is trying to do. I was about to buy a keyboard. I asked Claude to check the offer first. It caught two things I hadn't. The price is 20 zł above the same model sold elsewhere on the same site. And the 3-out-of-5 rating comes from one review, which means nothing. Good answer. I saved money.…
We Value Your Feedback. Do Not Reply. First in You Can Do Better — small product decisions that cancel out what the product is trying to do. I got an order confirmation from GoOrder.pl. At the bottom: "We remain at your disposal and are happy to hear any comments you have." So I hit reply. no-reply@goorder.pl . I checked the rest of the email. No support address, no contact link. The only link is…
Sexy Football, Measured — This Time I Was (Mostly) Right I have a football-geeky friend. We argue about football all the time — this player vs that player, this team vs that team. We split the difference on almost everything, and we both use AI to back up our own version. Last time the data proved me wrong . This round the question was: has Slot's Liverpool played sexy football? My claim: only at…
Days Without Missing a Commit My GitHub commit streak, on the Lenny "days without an accident" sign from The Simpsons. Paste a GitHub username at olekwrites.com/lenny and you get a live badge for your README — it re-renders itself from your contribution data, every day, on its own. I built it to keep my 100 Days of Code PACT honest: the chart shows the squares, the sign shows the number. The sign…
The Email My App Never Sent More from Building MarrowMinded — the reading app I build with Claude Code . Start here: I built MarrowMinded . MarrowMinded gives you one lesson a day from a book. The catch: you have to open the site to read it. I wanted it to come to me instead — land in my inbox each morning, no clicking. I'd even written the send code once, months ago. It never sent a single email.…
Which AI Writes the Best Lesson? I Made Them Grade Each Other More from Building MarrowMinded — the reading app I build with Claude Code . Start here: I built MarrowMinded . MarrowMinded gives you one lesson a day from a book. Under the hood it can run on different AI models — Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, and Groq's Llama. Which one writes the best lesson? I'd been guessing. So I built something to…
Add, Then Trim More from Building MarrowMinded — the reading app I build with Claude Code . Start here: I built MarrowMinded . MarrowMinded started tiny. One screen, a lesson a day, almost nothing on it. I liked it that way. Then I used it. And using it gave me ideas — a chat to ask about the book, a way to jump to any chapter, a progress bar, quicker navigation. Each one was useful. Each one…
100 Days of Code, as a Tiny Experiment "A PACT is a commitment to a specific action for a set period of time. Purposeful. Actionable. Continuous. Trackable." — Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments [^1] I've been reading Tiny Experiments , and one idea stuck. Most of us set goals like "get good at X" or "build a habit." Then we fail, and we decide the problem is us. Le Cunff says the problem is…
The Feature That Found a Bug Part of Building GribGrab — a series on what I learn building a weather app with Claude Code. GribGrab had four ways to pick a place: type a city, paste coordinates, tap GPS, or reuse a saved one. All of them are text. None let you just point . So I added a map. Drag it around, and the forecast loads for whatever sits under the crosshair. That's the whole feature. The…
A Skill Is Just You, Written Down I keep telling people: if you can describe what you want, you can build it now. I build my apps that way. I talk, Claude Code types. This week I built something different. Not an app — a set of small tools for Claude Code itself. And there's no code in any of them. They're all in one public repo: claude-code-skills . Update · 4 July 2026 — Two more since I hit…
Now It's Apps' Turn to Get Cheap Once the foundational tools are good enough, technique and training outperform hardware. — Seth Godin, "You don't need a better camera" Seth wrote that about cameras this week. The gist: past a certain point, a better one won't make you better. New snow tires beat a new car for winter driving. It got me thinking about something bigger. The tools don't just get good…
I Lost My Setup Once. Now It Lives in a Repo. This week I switched to a new laptop. Nothing dramatic — nothing lost or stolen. Just the old one out, a new one in. Almost everything moved over on its own. Documents, apps, settings — all saved in the cloud, all there when I logged in. Everything except one folder: my Claude Code config, plus a small file that lists my projects. That stuff was never…
The Analytics Were Mostly Me Part of Building GribGrab — a series on what I learn building a weather app with Claude Code. I added analytics to my weather app and felt great about it. The daily-users line mostly went up. Real people, checking real weather. Then I looked at who they actually were. The day that gave it away One day stood out. Lots of "active users," a nice tall bar. Then I removed…
The TODO List Nobody Maintains Part of Building GribGrab — a series on what I learn building a weather app with Claude Code. While building my weather app, I did the thing everyone does: I started a TODO.md . It was great for a week. Then I stopped using it. Three reasons it stopped working 1. My new ideas were better than the old ones. Every time I sat down to work, I had a fresh idea. It was…
I Gave Claude Code Google Docs-Style Comments Part of Building GribGrab — a series on what I learn building a weather app with Claude Code. Google Docs has this collaboration system I love: you highlight a line, drop a comment, and bounce back and forth in the margin — suggestions, questions, replies. It's the back-and-forth that makes it work. That's the one thing I missed when I moved most of my…
I Built a Weather App, which I use every day. This is the start of a series about what I learn while building GribGrab — a free hourly weather chart I made with Claude Code. Notes on the product, the process, and the tools along the way. The series so far I Built a Weather App — the origin story (you're here) The TODO List Nobody Maintains — keeping a project list honest without touching it I Gave…
Are You Sure About That? The Prompt That Changed How I Use AI "Are you sure about that?" This should have been the first thing I said to AI after every initial answer. Why? It gives better responses when I doubt it from the start. I've tried it on several prompts — and the difference is real. Why Skepticism Works AI models are trained to be helpful. That sometimes means they confidently fill gaps…
I Read a Lot. I Remember Almost Nothing. So I Built This. This is a series about building MarrowMinded — one AI lesson a day from books I've already read, made with Claude Code. Notes on the product, the process, and the tools along the way. The series so far I Read a Lot. I Remember Almost Nothing. So I Built This. — the origin story (you're here) Which AI Writes the Best Lesson? I Made Them…
Siri Feels Like 2014—And Apple Doesn't Seem to Care I've been using Opera Neon on my laptop. Together with Claude Code and Claude, I can do a lot. Research, writing, coding, data analysis—you name it. The AI works so well that I forget it's even AI. Then I ask Siri to do something. "I can't do that." The contrast is jarring. What Siri Can Actually Do Don't get me wrong—Siri is useful for the…