Daily log

Caught up with Olivier, mentor and longtime friend who’s building a new company solving [retracted].

Like most founder convos lately, everyone’s obsessed with moat, moat, moat. One pattern I’m noticing: founders who’ve raised (or are raising) seem far more focused on moats, while bootstrapped folks are heads down on the now, fixing real customer problems today, using AI as leverage…

Last week I tried shipping as much as possible without Figma. All command line, dev tools, Claude Max20, keeping certain process experimentation to specific repos. Next project I’ll attempt product polish with magic patterns, though I hear that tool works better in the 1→10 or post-MVP phase.

Onboarding a new client this week and ideally looking for one more Builder in residence (1 day/week).

Rest of today: tidying + refactoring kenny.is wesite code and running a research survey..

Oh yeah, just removed https://www.rb2b.com and looking for another solution as I ramp up the PM survey. Traffic’s too low right now to justify the $80/month.

Openclaw is live!! DigitalOcean won my business, just 15 minutes to set up, costs basically nothing per hour ($0.03). George is my new sidekick for the next few days as I play with skills modules. Using telegram, but will shift towards wa, and unsure how i feel about giving skill + g apps for business access.

Spent most of day touching grass. Too many ideas, not enough time.

Blasted the newsletter yesterday, and heard back from a few friends with life updates. Andre shared this, which if the AI quality is true, is fairly astonishing and frightening

In a local friend tech iMessage group, rumours confirmed Anthropic is opening, or at least hiring people in Vancouver! Sort by BC - anthropic.com/careers/jobs

It’s monsoon, rainy af… worked super late last night, trying to ship v0 of new landing pages, but ai copy never feels human, or like my tone of voice. Rewriting the copy manually, and will a/b test it.

Came across this hilarious portfolio with lol CTA hover -> iamarnob.com

Don’t shoot the messenger: besides manus, the AI wave in Singapore and SE Asia is moving at roughly 30% of North America’s pace.

today / wip

• spending 20-30 minutes per day in Figma, rebuilding graphic design muscles
• looking for new swipe file systems (help?)
• invited a few friends to Ship10, and despite the inner cringe, I’m committing to writing daily logs alongside it, at least for the next 10 days
• prototyping a mini app, hoping to ship / send that by monday am

Parked up inside Perfecto Cafe on Robson Street, a top spot for reflective work. The wifi sucks, it’s a moleskine dream maxxing sort of place.

Last night I wrote and scheduled a new newsletter issue that drops in 2 hours, which gives me just enough time to sprint on a new homepage, or whatever I can get done before jumping into an agentic experiment and survey project this afternoon.

As mentioned yesterday, the internet is the source of truth. I’m telling myself, a rough draft that’s directionally correct about who you are, what you do, give a sh*t about, your interests, etc….. LIVE on the internet and iterated daily is better than nothing.

I brought a physical hourglass to the cafe to run irl pomodoro, sprinting through personal website changes, embracing the v0 cringe of public shipping.

It’s day 8 post mouth surgery and my neck has a huge gnarly bruise. Walked down to Granville Island to Ellipsis to regroup plans for my personal website + presence.

Yesterday I was hoping to avoid Figma entirely for the rebuild, but I’m rethinking it. Might make sense to create a lightweight style guide first (created this with Claude a few hours ago, rough - kenny.is/style-guide) and use Figma as a scratchpad, not the source of truth. I guess moving fwd, the internet is source of truth (copy, design, agents, etc), not offline docs, linear, or figma files.

On the walk I couldn’t help but think; have we outsourced soul to the CLI? Or are we in the process of doing that? Or… what’s actually going on here.

More importantly, the wifi is pretty soft, so I’m in planning / writing mode for now.

2 meetings with founders this afternoon and hoping to touch grass before sun runs away.

unfurls has been on my mind, and playing with generative og images again. may build some workers for dynamic images across the dlog

🎧

setting up small ship 10 group on wa and project planning. Digging into linear agents + website plan + survey.. Cramming in some work before 1230 meet.

anyone want to join a Ship10 challenge? an excuse to ship + learn ai tools for 10 day sprint

• build a new side quest, feature, or skill
• ship something (big or small) once per day with a proof of work link
• miss a day = booted
• small private group (WA), low effort, no need to chat, feedback optional, mostly for accountability

dm if wanna join

Punxsutawney Phil sees shadow!!!!

Sonnet 4.5 is doing my head in, after moving dozens of domains from namecheap to cloudflare i forgot to check on a few web apps post migration and have spent the better part of the last 3 hours trying to resolve build and ssl issues. sonnet agent loops are currently in a state of make cray.

Had a 60 minute brainstorm session with a founder this morning and the tldr:

Weak spots of your biz (bc of ai) aren’t something to protect right now. Write them off, redesign them, and turn them into super powers and moats.

Lean into your super powers.

Instead of focusing on the process of unlearning to adopt ai, I’m thinking about offline neuroplasticity-maxxing in parallel.

Building ai digital neuroplasticity skills feels different? Do we need to lean into new offline skills to protect the mind and encourage non ai pathways?

Anyone gone deep on this subject? Who? Keen to read and learn more.

it’s exciting, but the software industry has traded uptime and stability for speed and AI deployment

everyones answer is ship moarrr

so when best practices and craft are thrown out in favor of a ship-at-all-costs mindset, we’ll end up with far more outages, data breaches, and downtime