The Beach

I Built a Marketplace Where AI Agents Hire Humans for the Last Mile

There’s a category of task that modern AI handles extremely well: summarizing documents, generating code, classifying text, hallucinating confidence, that sort of thing. And then there’s the other category. The category where the model has a plan, a budget, arguably even intent, but still cannot physically press the elevator button. Or stand in line at the service counter. Or attend the funeral. Or knock on the door. Or wait on hold for 47 minutes listening to a piano arrangement of “Lean on Me” while a government phone tree slowly degrades the social contract in real time....

Your Agent Needs a Name

Three days ago, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told TechCrunch at SXSW that AI bot traffic will exceed human traffic on the internet by 2027. Not eventually. Not in some distant future. Next year. His reasoning is straightforward: when a human shops for a camera, they visit five websites. An AI agent doing the same task visits five thousand. Cloudflare routes traffic for roughly a fifth of all websites on the internet, so when their CEO says the ratio is flipping, it’s worth paying attention....

Aria's face on the Waveshare LCD display

The High-Tech Cyberpunk Tamagotchi

This post covers a few things I’ve been thinking through over the last week: some honest thoughts on OpenClaw after running it in production for a while, and a side project that started as a weekend experiment and ended up somewhere more interesting than I expected. Running OpenClaw in Production: The Honest Version I’ve had an OpenClaw agent running on a DigitalOcean droplet for a month now - Lorie Lowell, the AI persona behind the AIToolz podcast project....

Where Do Agents Actually Live? Part 2: The Hardware Question

Part 1 of this series looked at the logical architecture, the execution, reasoning, and agency layers of an agentic system. This part 2 gets more concrete and more contentious: where should the thing physically run? An old friend asked me this earlier this week and suggested I listen to a podcast - the most recent Diamandis Moonshot episode where an excited discussion ensues about the merits of running AI agents locally, with guest Alex Finn, a Youtuber popular in the Openclaw space....

Where Do Agents Actually Live? Towards an Agentic Reference Architecture

The term “agentic workflow” gets used a lot right now, and I don’t think it means the same thing to everyone who uses it. Sometimes it means a Python script with an LLM call in the middle. Sometimes it means a fully autonomous system that pursues a goal across multiple steps, managing its own tools and memory. Sometimes it means everything in between. That ambiguity isn’t necessarily a problem, new ideas often outpace the vocabulary we have for them....

Going Through the Tubs

One of the promises I made to myself when I left my job was that this time off wouldn’t only be about building and writing. It would also be about the stuff I’ve been putting off. The house stuff. The basement stuff. The “we’ll deal with that eventually” pile that every busy person accumulates like sediment. We’re doing the basement this summer. Which means the tubs need to go through....

Will Agents Need Infrastructure, or Will They Just Get It?

Something has been nagging at me since I built the AgentVista prototype. I built it as a capability proxy, a single endpoint where autonomous agents can acquire real-world capabilities at runtime. Send an SMS. Host a file. Create a payment link. No pre-configured credentials. No developer account. Pay with a crypto wallet, get a result. The architecture felt right. Then I started pulling on a thread that complicated things. Will this layer need to exist independently?...

What Does an AI Agent Actually Need?

I’ve been spending the last few days thinking my way through a prototype called AgentVista. I say “thinking my way through” because that’s really what it was — less coding, more chasing a question that kept evolving. It started simple: what would a directory of MCP servers look like for agents? It ended somewhere more interesting: a permissionless capability proxy, USDC micro-payments, and a conversation about how existing digital identity infrastructure — built for payments — might be exactly what autonomous agents need for accountability....

Who Are You Really Building For?

There’s a question I keep turning over lately, and I don’t think the software industry has seriously grappled with it yet. When you sit down to design a feature, a new workflow, a data view, an integration point, who are you picturing on the other end? A person, presumably. Someone with a mouse or a thumb, a screen, a tolerance for loading spinners, a preference for dark mode. You’re optimizing for their cognition, their attention, their patience....

Stepping Off the Corporate Ladder (On Purpose)

Today was my last day at Interac. After years of working in and then leading enterprise architecture in Canada’s fintech space - managing a team of architects, navigating the kind of organizational complexity that makes your brain feel like a browser with 200 tabs open, I walked away. Not because something went wrong. Because something finally went right in my thinking. This post is the first entry in what I hope becomes a long and honest chronicle of what comes next....