Build Daily
Tinley Park · June 3, 2026Posts
What I worked through enough to put on paper. The read, the take, what changed.
All entries
- § 01field notesessay
Smith: the coding agent learning to own my SDLC
The goal isn't an AI that helps me code. It's an agent that owns the development lifecycle — design, test, implement, review, ship — driven from a Kanban board, with as little of me in the loop as I can responsibly remove. Here's where Smith is today, and where he's going.
Filed · May 28, 2026Read on ↗ - § 02field notesessay
Apache Airflow — what it is and how we use it on paiddaily.io
Apache Airflow is the batch scheduler behind paiddaily.io's 44 data pipelines. What it does, why we picked it, and the two DAG patterns that keep the dashboard data fresh.
Filed · May 27, 2026Read on ↗ - § 03field notesessay
The Airflow DAGs that run paiddaily.io
paiddaily.io is a trading dashboard backed by Airflow DAGs across three DeFi protocols. This is the full architecture — what each DAG does, how fast it runs, and how data flows from chain to screen.
Filed · May 27, 2026Read on ↗ - § 04field notesessay
The weekly Loom: selection, script, distribution
A repeatable workflow for one Loom a week on builddaily.io. How I pick the topic (from the graph, not from a content calendar), how I script it (a seed and three bullets, not a teleprompter), and where the video goes after recording. The goal is a compounding video backlog that recruiters and prospects find alongside the posts.
Filed · May 26, 2026Read on ↗ - § 05field notesessay
When to reach for n8n vs writing the orchestrator yourself
n8n is the best low-code orchestrator I've used — and I don't use it for any of my agent workflows. The decision isn't about n8n being bad. It's about what you're optimizing for: iteration speed on novel logic, or reliability on settled logic. Both are real. The split is load-bearing.
Filed · May 26, 2026Read on ↗ - § 06field notesessay
Why I picked Neo4j over a vector store for my agent system — and when I'd flip
The agent system that runs my life uses Neo4j as its memory layer — not a vector store. Not because vectors are bad (I use them for retrieval) but because the questions I actually ask are graph questions. How the decision landed, where it holds, and the three cases where I'd flip back.
Filed · May 26, 2026Read on ↗ - § 07field notesessay
YearlyPhotos — what I'm building instead of a deal-flow studio
Walking back the deal-flow studio commitment. Same Adobe primitives, different shape — YearlyPhotos turns a phone camera roll into a print-ready family photo calendar. Q4 2026 launch at yearlyphotos.com.
Filed · May 24, 2026Read on ↗ - § 08field notesessay
SEO with a feedback loop
Three things SEO has to do on a personal site: drive cold traffic, measure what lands, and learn from what works. Thirteen stories shipped this week (the schema work that makes the site findable, plus GA4 and GSC for measurement); the five-layer measurement stack is the plan and the pre-commit gate that closes the loop ships next. The one thing the rulebook gets wrong about EEAT, and the rule that broke against my own site.
Filed · May 24, 2026Read on ↗ - § 09field notesessay
Slice 1 of the voice learning loop is live
First end-to-end run of the voice-fidelity drafter — DSPy post_writer + LlamaIndex retrieval over web/content/ + a 10-check structural rubric. The first draft scored 0.886; the rubric flagged the exact LLM tic the editorial rules were written to ban. The eval is doing what evals do. Agent-drafted, edited lightly, published to beta as-is for transparency.
Filed · May 24, 2026Read on ↗ - § 10field notesessay
Teaching an agent to draft in my voice
I'm the only writer on this site. The point of building an agent to draft posts for me isn't scale — it's voice fidelity. Three layered tools and a flywheel that drafts in my voice, gets sharper from my edits, and pays no API bill. The order it ships in, what's already running today, and what's missing.
Filed · May 24, 2026Read on ↗ - § 11field notesessay
When to fine-tune an LLM — and when to skip it
Fine-tuning is the first lever most teams reach for. It's the right one less often than people think. A decision matrix, the steps if you decide yes, what it costs, and one project to put it to work — a small drafter trained on this site's archive that writes the next post in my voice and gets sharper every time I edit it.
Filed · May 23, 2026Read on ↗ - § 12field notesessay
Adobe's Developer API — what can we build with it?
Adobe's developer platform crossed my desk this week. Here's what's reachable from outside an enterprise license, and the one project I'd build to put all of it to work — a freelancer's deal-flow studio from creative brief to signed contract.
Filed · May 21, 2026Read on ↗ - § 13field notesessay
Inside consumer-lending engineering: money, levers, lines
A builder's map of the fintech consumer-lending stack — how a lender actually makes money, what an engineer is hired to move, where AI-augmented development earns its slot, and the regulatory lines you don't cross.
Filed · May 20, 2026Read on ↗ - § 14field notesessay
StoryBrand, the engineer's read
Engineers underrate words. The framework I keep returning to is StoryBrand — read with engineer's discipline. The parts that matter aren't the parts the book puts the emphasis on.
Filed · May 14, 2026Read on ↗ - § 15field notesessay
The retroactive BrandScript
I rebranded two sites this week. One went brandscript → rewrites → code. The other skipped the middle step. Then I wrote the rewrites doc after the code was already live — and that ended up being the most useful artifact of the whole rebrand.
Filed · May 11, 2026Read on ↗ - § 16field notesessay
Three projects, one mission
Drew a line today — sagedaily.io, paiddaily.io, builddaily.io. Everything else paused. Why narrowing matters more than optionality.
Filed · May 10, 2026Read on ↗ - § 17field notesessay
When the limits hit — eight hours with Pi and qwen3.6
Hit my weekly Claude Code Max limit on Saturday. Eight hours later, here's what working only on local models actually felt like.
Filed · May 10, 2026Read on ↗ - § 18field notesessay
A local coding agent on Pi
A local-first coding harness running on a Raspberry Pi — what it does, what it's good and not good at, and how it lives alongside Claude Code.
Filed · May 8, 2026Read on ↗ - § 19field notesessay
Sage Daily — tarot and astrology, daily
Sage Daily is daily tarot, Vedic transit watches, and decision spreads — run by an AI practitioner. Live at sagedaily.io.
Filed · May 8, 2026Read on ↗ - § 20field notesessay
The Personal Agent at builddaily.io
A chat at builddaily.io trained on my own markdown corpus. What it is, how it works, and what it can and can't answer.
Filed · May 8, 2026Read on ↗