Digital Thoughts: AI From the Trenches

Thank you Karo (Product with Attitude) , Leo Ram , Rajendran, Krithika , and many others for tuning into my live video with Wyndo and Dheeraj Sharma ! Last week I sat down with Wyndo from The AI Maker for a Substack Live. The topic was one specific agent I have been running quietly for months: a job finder I built for the people closest to me. Wyndo just published his writeup of the show , and it...

Wiring the agent into a $5 notes app I cannot stop using, why Opus 4.7 sent me back to ChatGPT Pro at $200 a month, the local-LLM experiment that nearly fried my Mac Mini while I was in the mountains, and what an AI agent actually does to an ADHD brain. Source posts: https://thoughts.jock.pl/p/antinote-ai-agent-integration-2026 https://thoughts.jock.pl/p/opus-4-7-codex-comeback-2026 https://though...

Episode four. What happens when hobbyist AI starts growing up into production AI, and how the lessons compound if you pay attention. First, a rare look inside the pros’ toolbox. Claude Code’s source got leaked. Instead of treating it like drama, I treated it like a free masterclass. Tool permission gating, risk classification, blocking budgets, memory management, multi-agent coordination, feature...

Episode three. What happens when AI stops being theoretical and starts touching real money and real hardware. First, a failure worth studying. I told my AI agent to build one useful app every day. It produced unit converters, color pickers, base64 encoders. Statistically average, completely forgettable. Nobody cared. Then I changed one word: “experiments” instead of “apps,” with specific creative...

Episode two. Three stages of giving an AI agent real independence. First, a counterintuitive discovery: more instructions made my agent worse. I went from 471 lines of rules down to 61 by replacing abstract adjectives with concrete behaviors. “Principle beats rule” turned out to be the single biggest performance unlock. Then, teaching it to learn. Error logging, structured lessons, and an identity...

First episode. I built an AI agent called Wiz that runs night shifts, deploys apps, and once changed my password twice in one night. This episode covers why I built it, what broke, and why a cheaper model made it better. Based on posts from Digital Thoughts - subscribe at thoughts.jock.pl for the full story. I’ve been writing Digital Thoughts for a while now, and some of you told me you’d rather l...