AI Journey Chronicles
A running record of how AI changed the day-to-day work of building business systems, one chapter at a time: from learning to write a good prompt, through pasting code into a browser chat, to an AI assistant that makes the code edits itself while a person reviews every change.
Each chapter covers what was tried, what broke, what stuck, and what’s worth knowing if you’re starting at that point today. No hype and no doom, just what actually happened.
Start at the beginning
Three short posts, one per year, from the first chat box to AI working inside business systems. Read them in order.
2023: Goodbye to Google, When a Chat Box Replaced Search
How a chat box replaced the search box, from a print floor and Dreamweaver to ChatGPT, and why you should keep a log of your AI work from day one.
2024: The Year AI Wrote 33 Posts a Month
GPT-4 for social posts, Stable Diffusion characters, RunwayML animation, and the first time code entered the chat: what a year of AI content taught me.
2025: When the Prompt Became the Spec
The year AI answers stopped landing in a chat window and started feeding software: prompts as specs, JSON output, and code built by description.
Pick a topic
2026, one story at a time. Each post stands on its own, so start with whatever you’re wrestling with.
Keeping Your Own Voice When AI Writes for You
AI drafts that invented my backstory, emoji-filled posts, and too much "I": how a written voice guide keeps AI writing sounding like me.
Half an App in 10 Hours: What a Coding Agent Changes
From copy-pasting AI code to a coding agent that edits files directly: what got faster, what didn't, and why pricing by the hour stopped making sense.
Copy, Paste, FTP: What’s Old Is New
Building with AI meant copy-pasting code through my clipboard and FTP, like Dreamweaver days. The rules that came out of it, and why I moved to git.
Same Question, Opposite Answers: AI Research Is a Draft
Two AI chats gave opposite verdicts on the same question. Why AI research is a draft, and the prompt rules that stopped it inventing facts.
When the Second AI Just Copies the First
A second AI pass that agreed with the first instead of reading the image, and a model that claimed to count but didn't: building checks around AI output.
The WebViewer Obsession: When FileMaker Became a Browser Host
How AI made JavaScript inside FileMaker web viewers practical: a batch engine, a race condition, and the old-fashioned fix that finally worked.
The Function That Doesn’t Exist: Testing AI-Written Code
ChatGPT invented a FileMaker function that never existed. What AI-written code gets wrong, why the runtime matters, and how to test before you trust it.
Rebuilding This Website With Claude Code, One Approved Change at a Time
An AI coding agent overhauled this website in one evening: staging first, backups, dry runs and human approval for every live change.
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