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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 hard for frontend work but it is a blind collaborator. It writes JSX, Tailwind, animation configs with fluency. It has ne...

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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 all...

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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 monolith database. Repos for all of it....

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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 read on current AI coding tools. Claude Code, Codex CLI, all of it. Capa...

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Zero to one

Seeing the pitch from the other side 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...

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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. When your workflow is prompt, review, iterate, the keyboard becomes the bottleneck you ...

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Execution

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

Teams ask the wrong question about speed. Not 'how do we ship faster?' but 'what is making us slow?' The first produces more tools and more ...

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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 AI headlines. To share how we actually build day to...

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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. Live before morning. Not a flex. A datapoint abou...

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Execution

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

Two startups, two acquisitions, one lesson: speed is the biggest advantage a small team can have. Not reckless. Not sloppy. The kind where y...

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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 universe into a skill. Then I saw the pattern: agent skills are composable...

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AI workflow

Better references beat better prompts

You still need to be crafty with the initial context. Most people skip it. Research papers, niche blog posts, specific docs, reference imple...

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AI workflow

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

The internet came full circle. Plain HTML, then SPAs, now back to markdown. The difference is who is reading. First time, humans. This time,...

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Voice AI

Someone lost their voice from talking to AI all day

I built Rubber Duck, a voice coding agent. A Todoist Ramble clone for Things 3 that streams audio to Gemini Flash 2.5 Live and runs tool cal...

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Developer tools

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

Claude Code on my phone via Tailscale and Termius. Beeper wired in so my agent can search and send messages across every platform. Raycast s...

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Product craft

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

People can sense carelessness. They cannot see the code, but they notice when something feels rushed or stitched together without thought.

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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. Default shadcn, Lucide icons, Inter, glowing gradient borders. It screams 'I prompted this a...

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Zero to one

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

I started working the day after high school. Not because I had a plan. Because I wanted to learn. Every role since then was picked the same ...

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Zero to one

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

People describe zero-to-one work as creativity, ambition, or willingness to move fast. Those matter. The real advantage is clarity. Clarity ...

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