https://johncderrick.com/logs/ AI, agentic systems, web architecture, and business strategy — from the digital lab notebook of John C. Derrick. en-us Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:00:00 EST https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/travel-operating-system https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/travel-operating-system Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:00:00 EST An announcement and the receipts behind it: HawaiiGuide.com is no longer a publishing platform. It is a travel operating system — an ecosystem for planning the perfect trip. Roughly 79 days, 118 shipped milestones, nearly 9,000 commits, 24 production services, 29 traveler tools, an audio route network, and a 12-country expansion. The case, by the numbers. https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/two-months-a-day https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/two-months-a-day Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:00:00 EST Anthropic just released its Claude 5 family — Fable 5 for the rest of us, Mythos 5 for approved organizations — and after a day and a half with Fable, my already-absurd pace doubled. From roughly one month of production per day to two. The math behind that claim, and why this model feels like a senior developer sitting next to me. https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/worth-the-hype https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/worth-the-hype Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:00:00 EST For a while I had the feels about AI — I knew something was happening, but I couldn't explain how it would turn into productivity. Then Codex and Claude Code landed, and HawaiiGuide went from a CMS-powered blog to a full AI-forward travel platform. Sixty months of work, by one coder, in sixty days. Why I now believe it's worth the hype. https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-jun-2026 https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-jun-2026 Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:00:00 EST New month, new ratings — and for the first time, a tie at the top. The Information confirmed what my commits already showed: Codex 5.5 edged back ahead of Claude Code, just barely. But the real story is the combo. Plus OpenAI's Codex-ChatGPT superapp and a 5-million-user surge. https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-may-2026 https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-may-2026 Sat, 23 May 2026 09:00:00 EST Five years of work in fifty days — a note on the AI multiplier effect, then a ranking of every major model by what it actually did under that load. Gemini 3.5 Flash lands at I/O, Karpathy joins Anthropic, and the frontier takes a breath while the bottom of the table keeps making the wrong headlines. https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-apr-2026 https://www.johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-apr-2026 Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:00:00 EST Opus 4.7 lands, GPT-5.5 ships, and the S Tier gets a real refresh while the bottom of the table keeps making news for the wrong reasons. My honest, earned April 2026 rankings. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-html-moment https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-html-moment Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:00:00 EST I assumed everyone would learn Claude Code the way I did — the same way I assumed everyone would learn HTML in 1997. They did not then. They will not now. The moat is not the tool. It is the willingness to sit with friction long enough to make it disappear. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-cost-savings-43-to-1 https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-cost-savings-43-to-1 Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:00:00 EST 21 roles. One person. ~$350/month. I broke down what it would actually cost to hire the team doing the work on Hawaii Guide — and compared it to my Claude bill. The math is not close. https://johncderrick.com/logs/mobile-app-coding-workflow https://johncderrick.com/logs/mobile-app-coding-workflow Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:00:00 EST I open Claude Code on my phone, pick a repo, and start talking. Plan mode for strategy, Code mode for action. From one page to 1,100 — the entire publishing workflow fits in a conversation. https://johncderrick.com/logs/conductor-not-instrument https://johncderrick.com/logs/conductor-not-instrument Sat, 28 Mar 2026 09:00:00 EST Post-CMS, the job changed. I used to spend weeks on maintenance I dreaded. Now I direct AI through the work in hours. The shift is not about laziness — it is about finally operating at the right altitude. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-one-percent-prompt https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-one-percent-prompt Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:00:00 EST Tom's Guide published a piece on the 'top 1% way' of using AI. Most of it tracks with what I have been doing for months. Here is what they got right and what they missed — plus three new prompts for the library. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-productivity-measurement https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-productivity-measurement Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:00:00 EST I spent five hours with Claude Code updating 193 pages across Hawaii-Guide.com — schema markup, GPS coordinates, freshness audits, FAQs. The equivalent manual effort? Four to eight weeks. Here is the math. https://johncderrick.com/logs/claude-code-channels https://johncderrick.com/logs/claude-code-channels Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:00:00 EST Anthropic shipped Claude Code Channels and Dispatch in the same week — Channels lets developers message Claude Code over Telegram and Discord, Dispatch lets everyone else control Cowork from their phone. Two products, same thesis: the agent should keep working when you walk away. https://johncderrick.com/logs/block-ai-layoffs https://johncderrick.com/logs/block-ai-layoffs Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:00:00 EST Block just cut 4,000 people — 40% of its workforce — and called it an AI restructuring. The stock jumped 25%. This is the template. Every company watching just got permission to do the same thing. https://johncderrick.com/logs/when-someone-has-to-think-about-the-unthinkable https://johncderrick.com/logs/when-someone-has-to-think-about-the-unthinkable Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:00:00 EST Amanda Askell wrote her PhD thesis on infinite ethics — how to make moral decisions when the world might contain infinitely many people. In 2018, that looked like navel-gazing. It was not. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-fog https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-fog Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 EST Wall Street is publishing doomsday reports about AI. The market is rattled. Analysts are panicking. And every single one of them is staring into the same fog the rest of us are. Nobody knows. That is the part that should humble you. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-life-stack https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-life-stack Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:00:00 EST AI is consolidating my life stack — web development, hosting, publishing, creative work — all pulled back in-house. I have been disrupted and I am the one doing the disrupting. Both things are true. That is the part the debate keeps missing. https://johncderrick.com/logs/solow-paradox-ai-adaptation https://johncderrick.com/logs/solow-paradox-ai-adaptation Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:00:00 EST 90% of CEOs say AI has had zero impact on productivity. The Solow paradox is back — and the explanation is the same as it was in 1987. The technology is not the problem. The humans are. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-feb-2026 https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-models-ranking-feb-2026 Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST My honest, earned rankings of every major AI model in February 2026. Seven models, four tiers, one clear winner — and one that earned a 'Nope.' https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-acceleration-tax https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-acceleration-tax Wed, 19 Feb 2026 15:00:00 EST AI made you three times more productive. Now you are three times more exhausted. AI fatigue, AI burnout, AI psychosis — these are not buzzwords. They are the cognitive invoice for the machine age. https://johncderrick.com/logs/openclaw-personal-os https://johncderrick.com/logs/openclaw-personal-os Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST Someone published 26 plain-English prompts that build an entire personal operating system — CRM, security, analytics, health tracking, daily briefings — all run by AI agents. This is what 'agents' actually means. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-gap https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-gap Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 EST Deutsche Bank asked its own AI which industries AI plans to disrupt. The answer was predictable. The part nobody has solved is what happens to the people caught between the old job vanishing and the new one showing up. https://johncderrick.com/logs/something-big-is-already-here https://johncderrick.com/logs/something-big-is-already-here Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:00:00 EST The Atlantic, Business Insider, the Wall Street Journal — they are all publishing the same story now. White collar work is being reshaped by AI. The question nobody can answer yet: replacement or amplification? https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-click-that-disappeared https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-click-that-disappeared Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:00:00 EST HawaiiGuide traffic dropped 60% in twelve months — while Google Search Console says our rankings improved. The click is no longer the unit of information consumption. AI Overviews ate it. https://johncderrick.com/logs/aimplified https://johncderrick.com/logs/aimplified Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:00:00 EST AI is not just a coding tool. It is a logarithmic amplifier for everything — from generating sticker graphics and apothecary recipes to learning worm farming and building production applications. The new specialization is learning how to yield it. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-dorm-room https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-dorm-room Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:00:00 EST There is a scene in The Social Network that everyone remembers wrong. It was supposed to feel exclusive. Now it is a tutorial. The barrier to building software is no longer a degree — it is a conversation. https://johncderrick.com/logs/sixteen-pages-twenty-minutes https://johncderrick.com/logs/sixteen-pages-twenty-minutes Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:00:00 EST We hadn't updated our Hawaii events since December. Claude Code updated 16 pages across four islands in 20 minutes. The same work used to take over five hours. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-onboarding-tactical-guide https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-onboarding-tactical-guide Wed, 18 Feb 2026 12:00:00 EST The theory says AI is the $20 employee. The philosophy says it changes who gets to build. This is the tactical layer — the actual SOPs, prompts, and delegation framework I use to turn an AI agent into a functioning team member. https://johncderrick.com/logs/agentic-ai-employee https://johncderrick.com/logs/agentic-ai-employee Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST Agentic AI gives everyone an employee — if they know what that means. For $20-200/month, the bottleneck is no longer headcount. It is clarity. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-attention-layer https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-attention-layer Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST Every internet epoch has a gatekeeper. First it was directories, then PageRank, then the feed algorithm. Now it is AI agents deciding what gets cited. The window for establishing authority in the new layer is open — but it will not stay that way. https://johncderrick.com/logs/edge-computing-ai https://johncderrick.com/logs/edge-computing-ai Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:00:00 EST Someone deployed OpenClaw — the AI agent that just got acquired by OpenAI — on a Cloudflare edge server for $5 a month. That is not a hosting story. That is an infrastructure revolution hiding in a pricing page. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-team-leverage https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-team-leverage Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:00:00 EST The AI discourse is stuck between 'it'll take our jobs' and Ghibli selfies. Meanwhile, one developer just built 180,000 GitHub stars by running AI agents in parallel. The real story is leverage — and most people are missing it entirely. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-copyright-strategy https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-copyright-strategy Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:00:00 EST I was a publisher for 20 years before AI ingested my content without asking. Here's why I stopped fighting it and started playing the new game. https://johncderrick.com/logs/proof-of-concept https://johncderrick.com/logs/proof-of-concept Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:00:00 EST The Open Claw founder and team are reportedly being courted by OpenAI and Meta. We have entered the age where solo creators and small teams, accelerated by AI, can get noticed by the biggest companies in the world. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-content-creation https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-content-creation Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:00:00 EST After weeks with Claude Code, I've realized content creation hasn't died — it's been restructured. The human still drives the insight. The machine handles the scaffolding. https://johncderrick.com/logs/end-of-rent-seeker https://johncderrick.com/logs/end-of-rent-seeker Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST Why business owners are shifting from renting software (SaaS) to owning software (Custom AI Builds). The rise of the Builder Agency. https://johncderrick.com/logs/agent-checked-my-blind-spot https://johncderrick.com/logs/agent-checked-my-blind-spot Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:00:00 EST A real-world example of Agentic AI anticipating needs. I asked it to update a date; it remembered to update the RSS feed I had forgotten about. https://johncderrick.com/logs/salesforce-in-a-basement https://johncderrick.com/logs/salesforce-in-a-basement Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:00:00 EST Watching the market argue about AI's impact on software. Why the "Buy the Dip" crowd is missing the point about unbundling. https://johncderrick.com/logs/credibility-passport https://johncderrick.com/logs/credibility-passport Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST Introducing a new standard for AI trust signals. How independent publishers can prove their reliability to agents without relying on Google or doxxing themselves. https://johncderrick.com/logs/shipping-the-playbook https://johncderrick.com/logs/shipping-the-playbook Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST I just published my first AI-assisted eBook. It is a guide on how to use AI, built entirely using the AI tools it describes. https://johncderrick.com/logs/night-i-rebuilt-the-engine https://johncderrick.com/logs/night-i-rebuilt-the-engine Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:00:00 EST Wall Street is panicked that AI will kill software companies. I just proved them right by rebuilding my entire affiliate engine in a single night. https://johncderrick.com/logs/meet-my-new-ai-colleagues https://johncderrick.com/logs/meet-my-new-ai-colleagues Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST A personal report on using Anthropic's new agentic tools. Moving from "Chatting" with AI to "Collaborating" with Agents. https://johncderrick.com/logs/small-business-cto-ai-guide https://johncderrick.com/logs/small-business-cto-ai-guide Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 EST A practical playbook for teams of 1-10 on how to leverage Claude, GPT, Gemini, and agentic AI tools to multiply output without multiplying headcount. https://johncderrick.com/logs/programs-hacking-programs https://johncderrick.com/logs/programs-hacking-programs Thu, 30 Jan 2026 14:00:00 EST We have entered an era where software writes software. Why Git is the final barrier between non-coders and the Matrix. https://johncderrick.com/logs/collaborative-velocity https://johncderrick.com/logs/collaborative-velocity Thu, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Transforming a website from 2016 Legacy to 2026 Modern in 180 minutes. Why the argument 'I can do it faster myself' is mathematically wrong. https://johncderrick.com/logs/swiss-army-knife-fallacy https://johncderrick.com/logs/swiss-army-knife-fallacy Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:00:00 EST Why selling yourself as a "Fractional CEO/COO/CTO" fails. The argument for the "Trojan Horse" strategy: Enter as a Specialist, deliver as a Generalist. https://johncderrick.com/logs/solo-practitioner-ai-amplified https://johncderrick.com/logs/solo-practitioner-ai-amplified Mon, 27 Jan 2026 14:00:00 EST Building a consulting website while simultaneously using Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini, and CyberDuck. This is what AI-amplified work actually looks like. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-perception-gap https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-perception-gap Fri, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Why Executives think AI saves them 8 hours a week, while their staff says it saves them nothing. The danger of the "Janitor Effect." https://johncderrick.com/logs/serverless-odyssey https://johncderrick.com/logs/serverless-odyssey Thu, 23 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST How I replaced a legacy IT department with an AI Agent. Building a distributed, serverless architecture (Workers, R2, Pages) in a single weekend. https://johncderrick.com/logs/creative-bridge https://johncderrick.com/logs/creative-bridge Sat, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST How AI allows coders to become artists. Adapting my reflections from 'CritterCute' on the dissolution of creative barriers. https://johncderrick.com/logs/chat-is-the-gui https://johncderrick.com/logs/chat-is-the-gui Sat, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Why the chat window is the ultimate GUI. Moving from the arcane syntax of the command line to the natural language of the agent. https://johncderrick.com/logs/trap-of-clean-code https://johncderrick.com/logs/trap-of-clean-code Sat, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Why "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY) is an outdated concept in the age of AI. The argument for abandoning templates and returning to raw HTML. https://johncderrick.com/logs/static-escape-hatch https://johncderrick.com/logs/static-escape-hatch Fri, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST How I migrated a 1,000-page legacy CMS site to a static architecture in 30 minutes using SiteSucker, Git, and Agentic AI. https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-empty-editor https://johncderrick.com/logs/the-empty-editor Thu, 16 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Reflecting on the shift from manual FTP transfers to Agentic coding. The moment the text editor became a command center. https://johncderrick.com/logs/end-of-cms https://johncderrick.com/logs/end-of-cms Thu, 16 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Why Agentic AI makes traditional Content Management Systems obsolete. The future is static. https://johncderrick.com/logs/agentic-code https://johncderrick.com/logs/agentic-code Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Agentic software transforms the user from Coder to Conductor. The barrier to building is no longer syntax, but clarity. https://johncderrick.com/logs/narrative-gravity https://johncderrick.com/logs/narrative-gravity Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Why fluency is not truth: Treating AI models as reasoning partners rather than oracles. https://johncderrick.com/logs/architect-bricklayer https://johncderrick.com/logs/architect-bricklayer Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Does using AI to write make you less of a writer? Addressing the 'sadness' of automation. https://johncderrick.com/logs/canary-coal-mine https://johncderrick.com/logs/canary-coal-mine Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:00:00 EST Why digital creators were the first to feel the AI shift, and why no profession is truly safe. https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-destruction-creation https://johncderrick.com/logs/ai-destruction-creation Sat, 27 Dec 2025 09:00:00 EST AI will destroy the information economy, but it creates the golden age of the solo manufacturer. https://johncderrick.com/logs/bits-to-atoms https://johncderrick.com/logs/bits-to-atoms Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:00:00 EST Why I am pivoting from digital publishing to physical creation in the age of AI abundance. https://johncderrick.com/logs/mirror-friction https://johncderrick.com/logs/mirror-friction Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:00:00 EST Why we are drifting toward AI and the dangers of frictionless relationships. https://johncderrick.com/logs/depth-mismatch https://johncderrick.com/logs/depth-mismatch Fri, 19 Dec 2025 09:00:00 EST Snorkelers vs. Scuba Divers: A theory on communication bandwidth and neurodivergence.