Skip to content
Matthew Blode

Blog

Essays on product craft, AI-assisted engineering, shipping fast, and zero-to-one work.

AI & design

Your AI agent has never seen the output of its own code

We use Claude Code intensely for frontend work but it is practically a blind collaborator. It writes JSX, Tailwind classes, animation config...

Read more
AI-assisted engineering

If you can build it in a night, the subscription is a tax on your own inaction

I wanted WisprFlow but did not want to pay for it. So I built Commandment, an open-source alternative with BYO API key, in a night. Then I b...

Read more
Execution

Rebuilding from zero is faster than debugging

I wanted shareful.ai to have a Mac app, iOS app, Chrome extension, Safari extension, frontend, and a big monolith database. I had repos for ...

Read more
Developer tools

The best AI interface requires five years of nerd knowledge

They are just trying to force normies into the terminal. That is my honest read on a lot of the current AI coding tools. Claude Code, Codex ...

Read more
Zero to one

Seeing the pitch from the other side of the table taught me more about building than building did

After years of building and pitching, I joined Airtree's Explorer cohort to learn what it looks like from the other side of the table. Evalu...

Read more
Developer tools

The keyboard is the last physical bottleneck between your brain and shipped code

I type roughly 60,000 words a week into Claude Code. That number used to be lower before AI made the feedback loop this tight. When your ent...

Read more
Execution

Do not ask how to ship faster. Ask what is making you slow.

When teams talk about speed, they often ask the wrong question. The better question is not 'how do we ship faster?' It is 'what is making us...

Read more
Product craft

We built a community the same way we build products

Six months ago, Ryan Hendler, Luca Bonelli, and I started a WhatsApp group. Not to track every AI headline, but to share how we actually bui...

Read more
AI-assisted engineering

Implementation is free. Taste is the bottleneck.

I deleted all the repos and rebuilt shareful.ai from scratch in one night with CC Max 20x. Had it live before morning. That is not a flex. I...

Read more
Execution

You do not win by being right. You win by finding out faster.

Two startups, two acquisitions, and one lesson that kept proving itself: speed is the single biggest advantage a small team can have. Not re...

Read more
Developer tools

Agent skills are becoming composable the way npm packages did

I made a skill that creates skills. Then I made allmd to turn the whole universe into a skill. Then I noticed the pattern: agent skills are ...

Read more
AI workflow

Better references beat better prompts

You still need to be crafty with the initial context. That is the part most people skip. Research papers, niche blog posts, specific documen...

Read more
AI workflow

We went from plain text to SPAs and back to plain text because the reader changed

The internet came full circle. It started as plain HTML with hyperlinks. Then it bloated into single-page React applications. Now it is coll...

Read more
Voice AI

Someone lost their voice from talking to AI all day

I built Rubber Duck, a voice coding agent. I built a Todoist Ramble clone for Things 3 where audio streams to Gemini Flash 2.5 Live and dire...

Read more
Developer tools

The infrastructure between you and your tools is the most underinvested part of your stack

I set up Claude Code on my phone with Tailscale and Termius. Then I connected Beeper so my coding agent can search and send messages across ...

Read more
Product craft

People can sense carelessness, even when they cannot see the code

One line I keep coming back to is this: people can sense carelessness. They cannot always explain it, and they usually cannot see the code o...

Read more
Design

It's obvious when you vibe coded your app, but it doesn't have to be

Everyone can tell when you vibe coded your app. The default shadcn components, the Lucide icons, the Inter font, the glowing gradient border...

Read more
Zero to one

Your career compounds like interest but only if you keep investing in learning

I started working the day after I finished high school. Not because I had a plan, but because I wanted to learn. Every role since then was c...

Read more
Zero to one

Zero-to-one work is less about genius ideas and more about clarity under pressure

People often describe zero-to-one work as creativity, ambition, or a willingness to move fast. Those things matter, but the real advantage i...

Read more