Tool Collector
Someone in your feed just posted their AI workflow. It has 12 tools, a custom API integration, and a Zapier chain that automatically turns podcast transcripts into LinkedIn carousels. It looks effortless. It looks productive. You look at your own setup — ChatGPT and a Google Doc — and feel a familiar
Tool Collector
GPT-5 just dropped. Or Claude 4. Or Gemini Ultra 2.0. Or whatever it is this week. You read the announcement, scanned the benchmarks, felt a pulse of urgency, and started thinking about whether you should switch. You didn't finish the project you were working on with the
Tool Collector
You have seven AI subscriptions. You use each of them a little. You are good at none of them. This is a structured experiment designed to break that pattern: pick one AI tool, use it exclusively for 30 days, and document what happens. The rules are simple. Following them is
Tool Collector
At some point — and it's hard to pinpoint exactly when — the tools stopped being things you use and became part of who you are. "I'm an Obsidian user" is not the same sentence as "I use Obsidian." The first is an identity
Tool Collector
There is a new model release roughly every two weeks now. Each one is framed as a leap forward. Each one makes your current setup feel suddenly insufficient — even though it was working fine yesterday. This article is about the treadmill: the mechanism that keeps you evaluating instead of executing,
Tool Collector
You have six AI subscriptions. You use each of them just enough to justify keeping them and not enough to actually learn what any of them can do. This article is about what happens when you pick one and burn the boats — 30 days, one tool, no switching, no "
Tool Collector
It is 2am. You are three tabs deep into a tool you'd never heard of two hours ago. You've created an account, run the demo, bookmarked the pricing page, and mentally rearranged your entire workflow around this thing. Tomorrow you won't remember the password.
Tool Collector
If you've read this far in the series, you've recognized yourself in at least two of the previous articles. Maybe more. The subscription inventory, the FOMO cycle, the creator-influenced stack, the switching costs you never calculated — some of it landed. This article is not here to
Tool Collector
You know this person. You might be this person. They can explain the difference between GPT-4o and Claude Opus in granular detail — context windows, reasoning benchmarks, system prompt behavior. They cannot point to a single finished project that used either one. This is not a caricature. It's a
Self Hosting
Every IP address on the public internet gets scanned. Not eventually — constantly. Within minutes of spinning up a fresh VPS on Hetzner or DigitalOcean, you'll see failed SSH login attempts in your logs from bots running through credential lists. You're not being targeted. You're
Self Hosting
The pitch for self-hosting always starts with the server bill. A $5/month Hetzner VPS running ten applications. Per-app cost: fifty cents. Meanwhile, those same ten apps on managed platforms would cost $100-300/month. The math looks like a cheat code. But the math is incomplete — it counts server costs
Self Hosting
Everyone who self-hosts eventually has the same Tuesday. The database won't start. The docker volume is corrupted. The VPS provider had a hardware failure and your server is gone. The backup you thought was running hasn't actually run in three weeks because a cron job silently