Daily log

Last night and early this morning, my experiments have been focused on how to collect information and onboard new humans into dashboards or shared agentic experiences.

A few moments ago I scrapped my fourth rewrite. I’ve decided to do two things: simplify, and go back to my trusted Moleskine.

For new digital experiences, my intuition says Claude, ChatGPT, while incredibly effective at producing a V1, miss the mark. This one just feels like microwaved slop. My goal today is to finish V1, scale back design, and get real humans through my new little mouse trap.

This mini launch won’t be what I’d hoped, it completes my first goal but not my secondary ones. Next week or the week after, I plan to try some of these radical onboarding experiences just for fun.

The question that remains open: how do humans and agents onboard and share collaboratively with other humans and agents? Shared spaces, context, banter, goals, and flowerz ✿.

Tonight, if I wrap up some other deliverables, I’ll go back to the Moleskine and jot through my ideal user experience and feels.

How does the banana chocolate chip muffin taste?

Pretty good, he said.

Yeah, I was thinking about getting one.

Oh, did you want some? Did you want to try it?

Oh no, I shouldn’t.

Yeah, go ahead.

The asker used his thumb and index finger to gently scoop the piece into his mouth.

Mmm, that’s actually pretty good. I’m gonna get one.

He walked to the counter. Sold out.

He returned to the bench.

Hey — have you tried the chocolate chip cookie?

No, I haven’t.

Do you think it will be any good? If I grab one, will you have some with me?

Oh yeah, that would be nice.

This was the start of a bromance between two strangers who spent the next 35 minutes sharing life goals, pleasantries, and newfound plans to meet halfway around the world in Tokyo. I sat front row, typing away on my MacBook Pro, in quiet awe. All from the last banana chocolate chip muffin.

after 10 days of testing every browser out there, i’m back on Chrome. Mainly for 2 reasons: the Notion clipper (basb) and Google video meetings.

exploring design agents today, specifically a brandkit agent for a product that was sunset but could be revived. inspired by Emmett - https://x.com/emmettshine/status/2024113482623258907

Claude utilization on my Max 20 plan increased from 4% per day to around 6% over the last few days. Let’s see how that trends for the rest of month.

Are admin dashboards dead? After 45 minutes refining and redesigning for a new mini app, I realized that moving forward, all report requests will be automated daily, potentially include a genAI UI report, and be accessed via command line or Slack. Duh. What am i even doing?

The second realization: AI sucks at PMM. I’ll make the claim rn, no model will ever fully get there. It’s storytelling and craft maxxing. It might generate word salad, but they’re empty greens. PMM is foreplay for beautiful product.

And with that, I’ll start PMM’ing this website. Whenever I roll up my sleeves and pace my hallway relentlessly, the positioning, perceptions, and idea maze balloon… both the product marketing and the product get stronger. New ideas. They feed into each other. Iterations, a/b, technical debt, pruning features.

imho, the best product minds use PMM as the gateway, a middle layer after v1 of the product. Amazon talks about starting with the press release, and that works for larger, established companies. In the 0 to 1 startup phase, I believe the dance is product → PMM → product → PR → then PMM again.

good night

Created four new projects today, and can’t remember ever creating as many gh repos in a single day where they weren’t all related to each other. One scope-creeped as I was making so much progress and the requirements I fed Claude kept changing like a mad men. Pushing claude! My biggest frustration rn, which is my own fault, is Claude Co-work inconsistencies with MCP and random timeouts.

Three competing challenges with my Ship 10 experiments:
Which track? Am I spending too much time or effort here? Focus whereee?

1. Development and shipping mini apps. Start and finish from command line.
2. Leaning into design: prototyping and refining as much as possible within design tools. Design, dev, design.
3. Marketing and growth: positioning, content, marketing copy, product marketing pages, design, and demand.
4. AI systems: operation, skills, shortcuts, integrations, orchestra, and so on.

The plan is continue Ship10 challenges through each area, shifting after this week from dev, design, mrktng, to systems. I may regret the sequence…

Juggling multiple AI projects takes significant cognitive load. Restricting the number of open tabs, bookmarks, and read-laters is paramount.

After 3 days of countless attempts to resolve Failed to start Claude’s workspace, VM connection timeout after 60 seconds, I finally found a fix. Came across via GitHub, and I’ll share the steps below:

ps aux | grep -i Claude.app | grep -v grep

mkdir -p ~/Documents/claude-vm-backup
cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/sessiondata.img ~/Documents/claude-vm-backup/
cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/macAddress ~/Documents/claude-vm-backup/
cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/machineIdentifier ~/Documents/claude-vm-backup/

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/vm_bundles/

As it mentions above, it’s a good idea to backup and be somewhere with fast internet to download the 10 gigs.

Building a mini app that includes custom surveys, data rooms, and shared spaces for builders and agents. The stack is Vercel + Supabase + Google Cloud + Next.js. Hoping to wrap by Sunday.. and if time allows it, squeeeeeze enrichment into both the survey flow and hangout rooms. Some PMM friends are bypassing customer development interviews or surveys and sticking with AI research. It’s a big no from me dog. Talk to the people, use the intuition, and of course use lord gpt. and why am i building this thing? Because it sounds fun.. And Google Forms + Airtable feel dated. Agent surveys are top of mind.

For here on kenny.is, I rebuilt almost everything without using Figma and it shows. It’s irking.. but I’d rather ship new product, versus PMM this website. websites will turn into containers, anyways, right?

Dogfooding 2 new design tools, and updated some imagery on the website. Focused on AI + design reps at the moment. Nothing is real until it’s out there and someone else has eyes on it. They can react or gawk at it.

Started onboarding with a new client that kicks off on Monday. Scrambling to ship a pyramid survey this afternoon.

Last night I vibe coded and launched an app in about 10 minutes using Claude and Vercel. No Supabase backend, nothing fancy, but what I was able to ship with limited prompts and time was scary. That barrier keeps dropping.

My friend Simon kept sharing attractive athletes over WA, so this was pretty much built for him.

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