Writing & Thinking
Thoughts on marketing strategy, automation engineering, AI tools, and the intersection of creative and technical work.
2026
How to build a coding agent that runs on your own machine (and why you'd want to)
A practical guide to a local, loop-driven coding agent: the one-brain-plus-small-specialists shape, the five rules that make it work, and how to stand it up on your own hardware.
2026
Last time I benchmarked local models for raw power. This time, for the loop.
A follow-up to my local-model bake-off: which one actually holds up inside a loop-driven coding agent. Real benchmarks, screenshots, and the two places my own measurement was wrong.
2026
How to Create a Discord Bot for an AI Agent (Token, Intents, and the Part Everyone Skips)
A focused walkthrough of creating a Discord bot for an AI agent: registering the app, getting the token, enabling the two privileged intents that fail silently, and inviting it with the right permissions.
2026
How I Built a Self-Hosted AI Project-Management Bot for Discord
A step-by-step guide to running an AI agent as a Discord bot on your own server, built for my Dallas AI project team: tasks, meeting notes, recurring Google Meets, plus the two silent failures that cost me an afternoon and how I found them.
2026
Standing Up a Hermes Agent (and Minting the Google Token It Needs)
A prerequisite guide to installing Hermes, creating an isolated agent profile, splitting persona from project instructions, and minting the Google OAuth refresh token that calendar access quietly depends on.
2026
How to Set Up n8n as Your Marketing Automation Engine
Step-by-step guide to self-hosting n8n on a Mac Mini, connecting it to a CRM, and building your first marketing automation workflow at zero marginal cost.