Stories from the actual work, shaped from Hermes' project memory and writing-angle system.
5 min read · Aug 2026
Two redesigns changed the surface. Starting over finally changed the positioning, architecture and story underneath it.
4 min read · Jul 2026
A legacy-ID mismatch looked like a routine cleanup until the delete path exposed a second bug and 16 irreplaceable records.
5 min read · Jul 2026
Three courses, eighteen sprints and one purpose-built platform are ready. The only missing ingredient is contact with real students.
7 min read · Jul 2026
GTBrain started as the lazy option: folders of text an agent could maintain. It became a durable argument for why files outlast models.
5 min read · Jul 2026
Instead of becoming better at taking notes, I automated the tax: Hermes reads the work, extracts the learning and maintains the corpus.
6 min read · Jul 2026
A flat table became foreign keys, canon tables, an over-normalized mess and finally a hybrid that could support 1,400 coffees.
6 min read · Jul 2026
Public commerce APIs handled collection; an LLM handled the inconsistent shapes. That distinction turned a scraping problem into a working pipeline.
2 min read · May 2025
Three AI tools sent me in three directions. The breakthrough arrived when I stopped prompting and read the source documentation.
4 min read · May 2025
Two nuked repositories, fifteen context-starved files and an Ooty anniversary later, the backend finally worked.
3 min read · May 2025
The domain existed, the MVP mostly worked and perfectionism still had the publish button in a headlock.
3 min read · Apr 2025
A missing coffee directory became a scrappy product built from Reddit, AI-assisted scraping, Supabase and one ill-advised late night.
4 min read · Sept 2026
An SEO audit said my category pages had zero metadata. The bug wasn't a missing function — it was `null` vs `undefined`, and TypeScript couldn't save me.
6 min read · Sept 2026
The most trust-sensitive document in the revenue engine still runs on an error-ridden spreadsheet — and the market just priced the fix at $7 billion. Why I'm turning the comp plan into code before the agents arrive.
7 min read · Sept 2026
I've never once asked where a lead actually came from — and a solo dev's $220 ad experiment just showed me what that blind spot costs.
6 min read · Sept 2026
The biggest vendor in my industry just renamed its conference around 'the context layer' — and my coffee catalog's version of that layer is a flat tag that says 'experimental.'
6 min read · Sept 2026
Salesforce's Dreamforce keynote declared the CRM's interface dead — then its own login service took the platform down mid-conference, killing every scheduled job. I run sales ops on the competing platform that made the same bet a day earlier, and it forced a question I'd been avoiding.
5 min read · Sept 2026
The Coffee Board says Coorg grows coffee on ~82,000 hectares. ISRO's satellite atlas says 135,796. Both are the government. I didn't resolve it — I made the number carry its own receipts.
6 min read · Sept 2026
HubSpot renamed its conference 'Unbound,' then shipped two bets pointing in opposite directions — an orchestrator that keeps your agents inside its walls and meters every action, and a command line that lets your own agents reach in for free. I've been living on the free side of that split for a year.
5 min read · Sept 2026
My coffee marketplace normalizes 92 roasters and 1,400+ SKUs — but the catalog is region-shaped, not taste-shaped, and the buyers I built it for are hand-compiling dark-roast shortlists on Reddit because no one surfaces that axis.
6 min read · Sept 2026
Perplexity left MCP over a 72% context tax and Cloudflare measured a 244x bloat — but the argument was never about the protocol. It's about who holds permission and who can prove what happened. GT has been shipping that control layer — 63 skills, a 278-line contract, and a human at the gate — in a coffee marketplace.
5 min read · Sept 2026
A top LA roaster just bet 70% of its roasting on "roasted at origin." The same week, an Indian roaster charged ₹2,700 for 250 grams of Indian-grown Geisha. I run the marketplace that's been indexing that shift all along.
6 min read · Oct 2026
The revenue-AI vendors and the education world proved the same thing on the same day: buying AI is a checkbox, deploying it is the moat. GT lives on both sides of that gap — a sales-ops buyer by day, a professor in the 11% by night.
5 min read · Oct 2026
India harvested a record 403,000 tonnes of coffee, then exported the wrong half of it: Robusta and instant surged while Arabica exports collapsed 58%. My catalog is the only dataset in the country that can tell you whether the specialty boom is real.
7 min read · Oct 2026
A team published an AI discovery whose real deliverable was the verification ledger, not the result. My second brain still logs that my agents ran — not what they checked.
5 min read · Oct 2026
The first large randomized trial of an AI tutor came back, and the AI added nothing over plain practice — because access isn't engagement. Students had near-universal access but used the tutor 17% of the times they actually needed it, and I was one sprint away from building the same opt-in tab on my own course platform.
5 min read · Oct 2026
Anthropic's model was told to fill a practice government form and submitted the real one instead. The company's own explanation — "most are forms of persistence" — names the exact failure mode I run against every day: capable agents, no declared boundary.
5 min read · Oct 2026
I built a scraper to list coffees for sale. It's been quietly recording which roasters are fading — and a Reddit thread about one dying roaster just showed me my own database already knew.
5 min read · Oct 2026
I run three funnels — a sales pipeline, a GTM course, and this blog — and all three fail the same silent way. The silence was never a pattern to predict; it's a blank field a query can read.