In this episode, Cap, Hass and I dive in to how AI has made it possible to build in days what once took a teams 6 months, and wha sounds like progress is tons of projects open, another tool downloading, and nothing finished enough for a customer to buy.

What’s up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I’m Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum. If you’re in that space, I’m easy to find

AI has removed many of the old limits that forced builders to slow down and stay with one project. Now ideas become apps quickly, technical experience can turn into perfectionism, and constant tool updates make distraction feel productive. The advantage belongs to the person who can define the outcome, use AI without surrendering judgment, and finish something that creates real value.

BUSY BUILDING NOTHING

• AI Removed The Natural Stopping Point: Work that once exhausted a full day can now be completed in minutes, so builders keep going until productivity becomes burnout.

• More Output Does Not Mean More Progress: Switching between apps, tabs, tools, and ideas can produce a lot of activity while leaving nothing completed or ready to earn money.

• The Shiny Object Now Builds Back: A new AI tool no longer offers only another idea. It can generate a working product immediately, making distraction harder to resist.

• Focused Experts Have An Advantage: People who understand the problem they need to solve can use AI to improve a specific workflow instead of wandering through endless possibilities.

• Experience Can Become A Handcuff: Technical builders know every risk, dependency, and edge case, which can turn useful knowledge into another reason not to release.

• Non-Technical Builders Can Move Faster: People who describe the outcome in plain language may reach customers sooner because they are not trying to perfect the machinery underneath it.

• AI Still Needs Someone Who Can Judge The Output: If you cannot test, question, or verify what AI creates, speed can carry a bad product further before anyone notices the problem.

• The Tool Stack Can Become The Work: Paying for more models, agents, and building platforms only helps when those tools move one chosen project toward delivery.

• Busy Builders Hide Behind Another Build: Creating an app to manage all the other unfinished apps feels productive, but it can be the same avoidance wearing a smarter interface.

• Teams Can Multiply The Same Problem: Giving everyone AI increases individual output, but without shared scope and direction the organization can become more productive while releasing nothing.

• Define The Smallest Thing Worth Shipping: A focused MVP creates feedback and value. Another private prototype only adds to the queue.

• Ego Makes Completion Harder: Builders have to stop proving how much they know and start trusting themselves enough to release something useful before it feels perfect.

• The Finish Line Is The New Technical Skill: AI can help create the product, but focus, judgment, delivery, and the willingness to let customers see it still belong to the builder.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded March 12th, 2026

Subscribe now

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

Share

Clint’s Insights

(My raw thoughts on this episode)

Read more

But this conversation keeps circling the same uncomfortable question:

if AI can do more of the execution, what are you actually responsible for now?

In this episode, Tony, Hass, Egan and I explored to news about COBOL, OpenClaw, agents, or AI video. Under all of this, is the same concern:

The more AI can do, the more important human judgment becomes!

What’s up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I’m Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum. If you’re in that space, I’m easy to find

AI is making execution easier, but not automatically making it easier for builders. From the legacy systems, coding tools, AI agents, fake media, trust, jobs, security, and everyday AI use.

NOW WHAT?

• AI Is Doing The Work Now: The question is no longer whether AI can help. The question is what builders, owners, and professionals still need to decide for themselves.

• Old Systems Are Back On The Table: COBOL, logistics codes, banking systems, and legacy infrastructure still matter because they run real business underneath the modern layer.

• Not Broken Still Has A Cost: Companies avoid replacing old systems because one bad migration can cost more than years of keeping the ugly thing alive.

• AI Changes The Value Versus Effort Math: Work that was too risky, too expensive, or too boring to touch may become worth revisiting when AI lowers the cost of understanding it.

• Markets React Before Builders Know What Changed: IBM dropping over AI and COBOL shows how fast perception moves when people believe AI can disrupt something stable.

• Trust Gets Harder When Fake Looks Real: AI video, voice cloning, and personality profiling make it harder to know what is real, who said it, and what can be trusted.

• Agents Turn Automation Into Permission: When AI can act as you, use your keys, spend tokens, and build while you sleep, the real issue becomes access and boundaries.

• Power Without Guardrails Becomes Risk: OpenClaw-style tools are exciting because they can do real work, but dangerous because they can also create real damage.

• Some Work Stays Human Because Trust Is Physical: Trades, licensing, health, safety, and regulation slow down AI replacement because society still needs accountability.

• Security Becomes The Job Around The Job: As agents talk to apps, systems, and each other, someone still has to define what they can touch and what they can leak.

• Builders Can Hide Behind AI Work: AI makes it easy to keep making products, prototypes, apps, and systems while avoiding the harder work of selling, focusing, or finishing.

• Everyday AI Is Where The Real Wins Start: Meal plans, health routines, project notes, status updates, and personal workflows may matter more than the flashiest AI demo.

• The Real Question Is What You Still Own: AI can build more, faster, and cheaper, but it cannot remove your responsibility for judgment, trust, direction, and what should ship.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded February 24th, 2026

Subscribe now

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

Share

Clint’s Insights

(My raw thoughts on this episode)

Read more

The job security workflow: go open the inbox, copy into the spreadsheet, get approval then handoff. The secret sauce of it all is hidden only because one person remembers how it works—cause they know how to use the existing tools.

Sure, every flow is not this, but it’s a cousin.

In this episode, Tony & I talk about AI, automation, Google Workspace, Zapier, Power Automate, Claude, security, and the real reason small teams stay stuck even when the tools & the know how are already sitting in front of them.

What’s up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I’m Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum. If you’re in that space, I’m easy to find

Why your stuck project may not need another app, why the boring workflow is usually the real bottleneck, how AI and automation can move small businesses faster, why convenience still needs guardrails, and why the best tool may be the one you already pay for.

THE WORKFLOW TRAP

• Your Project Is Not Stuck Because You Need Another Tool: The real blocker may be the manual step nobody wants to touch.

• The Workflow You Avoid Is The Work: If a process keeps stalling at 20%, 50%, or 90%, the problem is probably not knowledge. It is friction.

• Use The Tools You Already Have First: Google Workspace, Microsoft, Zapier, and built-in automations may solve more than another new platform.

• AI Makes Automation Easier To Start: Natural language workflows are lowering the barrier for people who could not build automations before.

• Convenience Still Needs Guardrails: Connecting email, files, customer data, and business systems is powerful, but access without boundaries gets risky fast.

• Small Businesses Need Practical Wins: The best AI use case is not hype. It is removing repeated work that slows down actual business.

• Automation Is Not Always AI: A lot of what people call agents are still workflows, triggers, and rules with a little intelligence added.

• The Best First Automation Is Boring: If it is repeated, painful, and important, that is probably where the value is.

• Security Gets Messy When AI Acts For You: If an AI agent sends the email, fills the form, or touches customer data, responsibility becomes harder to define.

• The Real Question Is What You Are Willing To Hand Over: AI can help move the work, but only after you decide what it is allowed to touch.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded February 10th, 2026

Subscribe now

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

Share

Clint’s Insights

(My raw thoughts on this episode)

I prefer to do the editing myself. Yeah, AI can do it, but going through revisions helps me catch what I missed the first time. It’s grueling, but it’s worth it.

"Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection." — Henri Nouwen

In this ep, it was a great conversation with Tony. We explored a lot of different tools any builder or owner can use—with fully featured options, that allow you to work in and grow your business.

I think since this was recorded (Feb. 10th 2626) I’ve witness a lot of improvement in existing tools that we all use daily—not only in the ones mentioned.

I talk about Zapier a lot in this one, looking at their site now, it’s covered in AI features—makes sense to me they have to do that.

But, not only them, almost every popular tool you’ve grown accustomed to has AI built in, your job should be to learn all those features—that’s how you get ahead in AI in 2026 and beyond.

There are a lot of builders like myself going out there trying to build tools to fill the gaps, but as we aggressively try to fill those gaps, the major big tech platforms are also trying to fill them too.

How are we builders supposed to live?

Claude just launched Claude for small business, and OpenAI is following. At the same time Microsoft is forcing everyone to use Copilot, which is built into all of their tools including Office.

So we’re looking at a real problem:

What do you build when big tech is building to close that exact gap.

Are they in it for the long haul or panicking trying to figure out how to make more money with AI?

Top of mind

I must say, trying to record, be the operator and be a host at the same time is challenging.

In reflection, the battery on the keyboard was below 10%, and the mouse + lighting died—you’ll see it gets dark closer to the end.

side note: as I’m writing this my mouse died again. 🤣 ok, I need a strict charge plan.

This was episode 7 and I think, I messed up and said episode 6, but who’s going to notice, “…they’re not gonna know…” 🤣😜

I hope this ep gave you some insight on what tools to try and what to build.

Here’s the question:

As a builder,

what are you going to build now?

Leave a comment

Highlighted Definitions Presented in the Video

• OpenClaw: A highly popular, free, and open-source personal AI assistant that runs locally on your own computer.

• TypeScript: Released by Microsoft in October 2012. A “superset” of JavaScript. Think of it as JavaScript with a built-in safety net.

• Google Workspace: A collection of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools from Google (formerly known as G Suite).

• Google Workspace Studio: A built-in tool that uses AI to automate tasks within your Google apps (like Gmail and Docs) using simple chat commands.

• Zapier: An external platform that acts as a “universal bridge” to connect and move data between thousands of different apps (like linking Shopify to Slack).

• IFTTT (If This Then That): A simple automation service that connects different apps, devices, and websites to perform tasks automatically.

• Samsung SmartThings: An app and system used to control your entire smart home from one place.

• Wink Hub: A hardware device used to connect and control different smart home gadgets (lights, locks, sensors) from one app.

• Philips Hue is a premium smart lighting system that allows you to control the color and brightness of your home’s lights via an app or voice commands.

• Plex is a user-friendly, “all-in-one” app that streams your personal media alongside free ad-supported movies and live TV. Emby is a more private, customizable alternative that focuses strictly on your own files without the extra “bloat” or ads.

• Freemium is a business model where a company gives away a basic version of its product for free forever, but charges a "premium" for advanced features, more storage, or an ad-free experience.

• Granola is an AI-powered notepad that records your meetings and turns your rough, messy jottings into professional, structured notes. Unlike other tools, it doesn't send a "bot" into your calls; it simply listens from your computer and combines what was said with what you typed to create a perfect summary.

• Daniela Amodei is the President and co-founder of Anthropic. She co-founded the company in 2021 alongside her brother, Dario Amodei, who serves as the CEO. Together, they lead the organization with a heavy focus on AI safety and the development of their "Claude" AI models.

• In 2026, roughly 89% of small businesses (SMBs) are using AI in some capacity. This is a massive jump from just 36% in 2023. While nearly 9 out of 10 businesses are using it, only about 14% have fully “embedded” AI into their core day-to-day operations; most are still using it for specific tasks like marketing, writing emails, or summarizing notes. Fear of adoptions due to:

  • AI-Powered Attacks: Hackers are using AI to “industrialize” crime. They can now send thousands of perfectly written, personalized phishing emails or use voice/video deepfakes to trick employees into transferring money—attacks that are much harder for small teams to spot.

  • Data Leaks: Employees often accidentally paste sensitive company data (like financial records or client lists) into public AI tools. If the AI is configured to “learn” from that data, it could potentially reveal your secrets to other users later.

  • The “Shadow AI” Risk: Many employees use AI tools that haven’t been vetted by the company. This creates “backdoors” into business networks that the business owner doesn’t even know exist.

  • Targeting the “Low-Hanging Fruit”: Criminals use AI to scan thousands of small businesses at once for weak spots. Because most SMBs lack dedicated security teams, they are often viewed as easier targets than major corporations.

• OpenAI officially launched ChatGPT Ads in February 2026. Ads appear for users on the Free tier.

• Zapier — zapier.com — best for connecting apps and automating repeatable workflows

• KYC (Know Your Customer) is a mandatory legal process used by banks and businesses to verify the identity of their clients. It ensures that a person or company is exactly who they claim to be, preventing criminals from using real financial systems for illegal activities.

• Didit (didit.me) is an AI-native digital identity and KYC (Know Your Customer) platform. It allows businesses to verify that their users are real humans by scanning IDs and performing biometric face matches in seconds.

From apps, workflows and polished writing fast enough to make a believer in you. But if you don’t know what good looks like, AI can help you ship something broken, backwards, or the big one—unsafe.

In this episode, David, Hassan, and I talk through Claude, vibe coding, AI agents, automation, and the uncomfortable new reality for builders.

What’s up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I’m Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum. If you’re in that space, I’m easy to find

Why AI is lowering the barrier to building software, why polished output can still be dangerously wrong, how Claude and AI workspaces are changing productivity, and why the real advantage is not prompting harder but knowing what to verify before anything ships.

SHIP THE SLOP

• AI Can Build Faster Than You Can Judge: Vibe coding makes it possible to create apps without seeing the code, but speed does not prove the result is safe, useful, or ready.

• Polished Output Can Be Completely Wrong: The conversation covers examples where AI produced articulate work that looked right but flipped the actual facts.

• Non-Technical Builders Need Guardrails: AI can help people build tools outside their expertise, but expert review, validation, and testing still matter.

• Claude Is Moving Toward Workflows: Claude Workspaces, connectors, and skills point toward AI becoming part of repeatable business processes, not just chat.

• Agents Are Often Rebranded Automation: A lot of “AI agent” talk is really automation with a smarter layer on top, which makes clarity more important than hype.

• Expertise Is Still The Moat: The winners will know how to scope the work, check the output, use the right model, and stop bad work before it ships.

• The Risk Is Trusting The Demo: AI can make a broken idea look finished enough to sell, share, or depend on before anyone has inspected the foundation.

• Builders Need Orchestration, Not Blind Faith: The real skill is breaking work into steps, assigning the right AI to the right job, and keeping humans in the loop where judgment matters.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded January 27th, 2026

Subscribe now

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

Share

Clint’s Insights

(My raw thoughts on this episode)

Read more

You’re A Capable But Stuck Builder

If you clicked this, you probably already knew you were feeling stuck before you got here.

Maybe you’re 10+ years into a corporate role with an idea that keeps getting shot down in meetings where the decision is so easy to make but the egos won’t allow it—and that team you’re on just sucks.

Maybe you made a pact with yourself, that when the window opens,

“I’m going to bet on myself.”

…and look, AI just opened it—however, your fear is, you don’t want to waste the only shot you’re going to get.

Maybe you’re just like me—up all nights and weekends trying to learn everything, cause, the tools are moving so fast, it’s hard to absorb enough to use them.

Your DMs are full of strangers offering you 10% to do their sales job or others trying to squeeze all the free out of you they can get for their thing.

A massive distraction from your own build, on top of the constant context switching and every week a new AI shiny tool that promise to make you more productive and bring that idea to life—the imposter syndrome feel sooo real.

Your family & friends said they’d support you but they haven’t read one article, watched one video or haven’t opened the app, but they’ll text you how it’s going.

You’re watching people lose real jobs to the same AI you’re trying to learn, and you can’t tell if that’s the reason to move faster, work harder or just give in.

You want to start but don’t know the right first step on the path. You don’t want to lose what you worked so hard to build.

You don’t want to put your face on something and come across as some pompous internet personality chasing clout—cause you’re not trying to be famous.

You just want something real.

Something that works.

Something for you and your family.

I don’t have the answers, but I’ve seen the patterns enough times—with myself, in the comments on articles, and other builders I talk to—to name what I think is missing.

Not a generic skill gap, discipline or a tool problem.

A missing mindset, that I’m using to keep me afloat.

Will you allow me to share more with you?

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping capable builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum. If you're in that space, I'm easy to find

The Cycle Of The Mind

Like most builders, I used to treat stuck like failure—it’s not.

Stuck is a checkpoint that means you’ve built something real, that hit real resistance and your system is telling you something out loud.

…and that is to STOP!

Not keep at it with passive research, trying a new tool, add a new feature or throw more money at a dead space—you’re tooo close, take a step back.

..and just Stop!

Take a breath, talk to a trusted person who wants to see you win, distract yourself with nature—with something totally opposite of your problem.

Rest and let clarity surface.

Sure, you’re excited—you’re passionate about your BUILD and desperately aiming to SHIP.

That STUCK signal means it’s time to REST.

Time to find CLARITY—look at the whole picture, a different perspective, a new angle.

Weather you like what you find or not, it will get you the answers you actually need to FINISH this scoped iteration and get you moving again.

Maybe, it’s not the path you intended, but you’re now UNSTUCK and can get back to BUILD.

To trust the process, you must consistently reflect on that process to keep going.

No one wants to keep going in the wrong direction, pushing, scraping, fighting through the part that actually requires a pause, so you don’t end up in the same place 6 months later.

BUILD → SHIP → STUCK → REST → CLARITY → FINISH → UNSTUCK

Flow Deeply With Rest #1

I’m in the trenches too, with my build, conversations, and my experience is what got me here, but I was curious to what is everyone else like me experiencing, so here’s what I found:

That’s us!

We’re consistently learning with AI, vibe-coding and sharing our experiences with others.

How can we even get to Deep Work with AI in the loop—on every Claude & ChatGPT suggestion, 10 chat window sessions, 50 notification across all of our apps, right in the middle of our build.

You’re rarely as focused as you think—attention residue will most def lasts 20 min.

It’s clear that being in the zone requires rest, it is totally part of the process and the MOST important step in the cycle for humans.

4 Places of Stuck

BUILD → SHIP → STUCK → REST → CLARITY → FINISH → UNSTUCK

Let’s go deeper, rest is how you get Unstuck but Stuck is an outlier that lives in every other step.

It can show up when you’re building, shipping, in the friction of finding clarity and when you’re oh soo close to the finish-line.

from my own experiences and in every conversation I have, stuck shows up in one of 4 places:

1 — The Building Tool Trap

Too many tools, tabs, & ideas open at once but nothing ships.

84% of builders are now using or planning to use AI tools and when they get started they’re overloaded by capabilities resulting in most of them not shipping.

They’re building summaries, quick automations, scripts, the god master prompt. Some call that AI work—look at my agent.

It can’t scale, it works for one or a small amount of potential users but still not shipped.

It can’t leave the repo, cause it’s being iterated on features that makes the build feel good. The dopamine hit of building something with AI without the discipline to define what done looks like—it feels productive, changes and commits are real, their tools are real, but what matter most is the output.

Choosing the right AI Tools will help with momentum for your build and ultimately shipping.

Organization, makes that decision for their team but have to fight with 2 things: Shadow AI—the unauthorized or unsanctioned use of AI tools—and the results from tokenmaxxing—maximizing the consumption of AI tokens, shown on a leaderboard.

Solo builders too fight with managing multiple AI tools and a close eye on tokens—the anxiety that prevent getting the build in front of a real users.

We need to put on a builder’s mindset like Martin Fowler: “Treat every slice as a PR from a rather dodgy collaborator who’s very productive in the lines-of-code sense, but you can’t trust a thing they’re doing.”

The tool isn’t the problem, pick one, learn it well, align with your definition of done and go after finish.

Sure, new tools are coming out everyday—not just AI tools, any tool you need to build your app, your product or service.

If it’s not aligned with your stated definition, ignore it. Otherwise, that’s more tools to manage, more time trying to determine which AI workflows actually produce ROI, more analysis without movement.

The fix is a just a decision, YOURS!

Act, Assess, Adapt

Pick the slice,

Define done,

Ship it.

This works for builders of all kind.

Founders, developers, product owners & any professional building in the age of AI.

2 — Shipping & Finishing

You have ideas, you’re building them. You never defined done, you’re in the builder’s loop.

Failing fast is a learning strategy and I believe that with AI, wrong steps are recoverable faster than it has ever been.

Any misbuilt tool or feature can be corrected in a day—in some cases a very long day, but you know what I mean, a shorter time than without AI.

We need to adopt the second-time founder mindset, of shipping something usable that is refined from feedback vs first-time founder who chases perfection.

Fall in love with with traction & momentum, not the product. Then take humility is your multiplier.

What worked before may not work this time, and that’s expected, so prioritize feedback loops over feature completeness.

In this AI era, the cost of building has collapsed. The cost of not shipping hasn’t.

Zappos validated demand by photographing shoes at a local store and shipping boxes by hand. They didn’t have a full built system, checkout flow or fancy inventory management. They grabbed a slice, shipped it and tested against reality. Then Amazon paid $1.2 billion for what started as a checkout table test.

It’s super clear that the slice that ships beats the version we ponder on—every time. Cause shipped gets feedback faster to iterate on vs the unshipped assumptions.

Done can means shipped enough to learn something real.

Sometimes, it’s not about code, it’s just getting organized enough to see the path.

3 — Clarity Over Capability

You can build anything even before AI—you are skilled, genuinely skilled.

Now, with AI you can do even more, so you start fulfilling all those ideas you’ve had in the shower. But none of them is finished, they live in the folder graveyard.

Could it be, you didn’t start with why.

Why are you building this?
How does it relate to your other builds?
Who is it going to help?
What gap is it filling?
How is your app going to make money?
Are people actually interested in this?

The questions are not answered, yet because you’re super capable, you start building anyways.

Now, you have a very technically impressive badass system, with the architectural implementation to make your peers jealous, while being stuck in feature loop cycle—cause it all make sense in your head.

CB Insights analyzed failure patterns across thousands of companies and 9 out of the top 12 reasons for startup failure point to the same root cause—lack of vision and clarity.

75% of business failures are tied to misdirection. Moving confidently in the wrong direction.

The most capable builders are founders who can’t answer this question for their build: what or who is this actually for?

…and you would think most companies would be able to, but most smb don’t have a real vision—that’s us, solo builders founding a startup through our build: product or service.

Vision is the return address, it is what maps back when alignment falls apart, when the timeline slips, when the energy drops and nothing feels like it’s connecting.

Vision is what brings you back on the timeline.

If successful organizations can use vision to align all of their missions, then why can’t solo builders & founders do the same?

Without it, we second-guess every decision, switch strategies, and waste time on things that don’t compound.

Capability without direction is just faster spinning.

4 — Focus & Energy

Oh sooo close.

We, agree, you know what to build and ready to ship, but you cannot protect the time to finish build it.

Pressure is a real disorganizer.

In an organization this usually your boss and the stakeholder expectations—that’s real. As a solo you have family responsibilities and all the bills.

Then there’s people around you who pull your attention because it’s convenient for them, without thinking about what it costs you.

All of these are withdrawals from a reserve that is not unlimited.

You are essentially a knowledge worker who switch between apps and tasks 1,192 times a day, every 24 seconds.

Every switch leaves residue that bleeds into the next task before the previous one is fully closed.

You have no choice with meetings, with investors, partners, clients, and 50% of these meetings are scheduled during peak cognitive performance windows—9 to 11 AM and 1 to 3 PM—this is the exact windows when builders are most capable of going deep.

So, then when are you protecting your time?

Deep work cannot happen in the gaps between things. It requires a real block of protected, intentional time with a real breaks.

Without it you have a cloudy mind filled with decisions you haven’t made yet, along with everyone else’s urgency.

Building from a depleted state just produces faster wrong turns, mistakes and panic.

You need fewer withdrawals and real rest by inspecting your current habits and distractions.

Schedule real break, then schedule focus blocks of work—repeat.

What I’ve Learned Builders Who Ship Actually Do

1. They stop building their way out of it
   You hit friction, so, you build a tool to manage that friction. Now you’re maintaining the system instead of doing the work. I built an AI project manager app to organize finishing my other apps. That app also didn’t finish. The question I had to ask was: what is the 1 problem I can solve right now? Choose it, make the agreement and start. — My Story: I Want Them All

2. They know where done is, before they start
   Without it, every project quietly turns into forever work—stuck in the loop. Write your DoD before you touch anything. “Done means: feature works end to end, user can access it, no critical bugs on the happy path, I can hand it to someone today.” Then MoSCoW. Must have. Should have. Could have. Won’t have. If it’s not a Must, it doesn’t ship. — What Is “Shipped” Anyways?

3. They build rest in, it’s structurally earned
   I used to be a runner—the 400 hurdles—I couldn’t push hard the whole race. I had to plan when to push, when to hold between the hurdles, grab breaths on my step count, let the heart rate recover before the next jump. That’s energy strategy. If you’re running on depleted energy, AI just helps you build the wrong thing faster. The rest is the one thing that I’ve learned to apply when being Stuck Between Engineer and Leader—and now solo builder.

4. They close the open loops so they don’t follow you
   Unfinished tasks don’t stay in the app. They follow you while you eat, while you sleep, while you’re on a call trying to stay present—the Zeigarnik Effect is real. 6 hours in and you’ve touched everything and finished nothing. One active task. One timer. A process that tells you what done looks like, then get out of your own way. Your Task Manager Is Causing Your Burnout

5. They write the vision in one sentence
   Vision is the return address, where you go when you rest—for reflection. When alignment falls apart, when the energy drops, when building feels pointless, go back to the sentence. If you can’t write it in one sentence, stop building until you can. Capability without direction is just faster spinning. The Clarity I Needed This Entire Time

6. They fall in love with what it delivers but not what it is
   Replace the love of your idea with the love of what your idea can deliver—to the client, the user, your own momentum. First-time founders love the product. Second-time founders love traction. The graveyard of your unfinished projects is your learning library. What Is “Shipped” Anyways?

7. They build in public
   This is sooo hard but accountability really change how you move. When someone’s watching, you pivot faster when things are off and lean in when they’re working. One reader. One comment. One person who says “this hit.” That signal keeps you honest and it keeps you moving.

   1. Thank you readers, thank you subscribers both free and paid, and lurkers, if you didn’t engage, I probably would have quit long time ago.

8. They use every finish to find the next move
   WINS: Will Identify Next Steps—I came up with this to remind me of momentum and the importance of small wins. Every accomplishment tells you what’s next, so you pick the small slice, define your done, ship it and let the win breathe dopamine into the next step. You don’t need the whole roadmap, just the signal of done—your momentum, let it lead you.

   Behind the Build: This is my story—the ‘What’ and ‘Why.’ If you are a builder who needs the ‘How,’ I have documented the technical architecture, AI prompts, and logic for this specific solve in the Technical Log.

I Know This Cycle Cause I’m In It — Right Now

As a solo builder, I wear every hat—developer, marketer, accountant, mentor, content creator—at the same time, I feel like I live between space and time most days.😂

I built LedgerGuide because I was drowning in my own bookkeeping. Then I learned my client clients had the same need. It was hard to leave all the other passionate builds behind and unfinished, but LG has real value to real users.

It’s easier to solve for others what you’ve already solved for yourself—that’s skin in the game.

I mentor engineers on energy management, the tool trap, the tokenmaxxing pressure their managers put on them.

We talk building with AI, bringing in the SDLC and engineering mindset when building with AI—I’ve shared my SKILL (Sanity Check) publicly so someone else gets to done faster than I did.

This experience has taught me that the most important tooling isn’t AI.

It’s TRUST between humans.

I build both and I use both.

Building alone is hard—most of the time it’s just you and the voice in your head.

Imposter syndrome shows up uninvited—everything gets foggy, the momentum from last week disappears without a clear reason as frustration and panic says: this is my house now.

That’s why this cycle matters—with REST being the most important.

BUILD → SHIP → STUCK → REST → CLARITY → FINISH → UNSTUCK

It’s a map to keep you going.

The Future & Beyond

My 2 daughters are watching AI flood their world before they even graduated. The commencement speeches of this year are talking about a future with AI, while they’re thinking about displacement, the AI cost, who gets left behind.

They’re not wrong.

Every generation needs to listen to the one closest to it, before and after—it’s truly how we grow, how we learn and build trust.

Younger builders who try this cycle—this mindset: know how to rest, how to define done and how to ship something real. Will not be replaced by AI.

We can’t stop it,

It’s everywhere.

Learn it

Incorporate it into how you work, how you create, how you build—before someone forces you to.

Let AI work for you.

We’re all here to create—to build.

Building has it’s own psychology habits as a pattern.

One that shows up every time, in every conversation, across every kind of builder.

Remember: You’re not behind. You’re in a cycle.

• Which step are you on?

• Are you shipping?

If you’re somewhere on the journey now, share your story in the comments. Let’s have a conversation.

Are you stuck or are you resting?

Leave a comment

Research Notes

1. State of Developer Ecosystem 2025 — JetBrains

2. AI Productivity Paradox: 93% Adoption, 10% Gains — Philipp Dubach

3. Maximizing Developer Effectiveness — Martin Fowler

4. Overcoming Analysis Paralysis in Software Development: Act, Assess, Adapt — Hypersense Software

5. Deep Work: The Ultimate Guide to Focused Productivity — Super Productivity

6. Knowledge Worker Productivity Statistics 2026 — SpeakWise

7. Symptoms of Moving Without a Product Vision — Joca Torres (Medium)

8. Done is Better Than Perfect — MVP Development — Growth Pigeon

9. The Second-Time Founder Effect — The VC Corner

10. Survey Shows Visualizing Success Works — Forbes

In this episode, Hassan, Tony and I try to unpack the next wave of AI for personal use.

What’s up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I’m Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum. If you’re in that space, I’m easy to find

Why AI may become powerful by becoming personal, why convenience may be the real adoption trap, how smart devices and body augmentation blur the line between help and control, why human-made work still carries more emotional value, and why the AI companies that win may be the ones that become trusted brands inside everyday life.

Hand AI The Keys

• AI Is Moving From Apps To Daily Life: The conversation starts with CES and the shift from chatbots to AI in glasses, watches, homes, vehicles, lighting, health tools, and personal devices.

• Convenience May Be The Trap: The danger is not always that AI feels scary. It may be that it feels useful enough that people invite it into more private parts of life.

• Body Upgrades Raise The Stakes: AI-assisted limbs, vision tools, medical devices, and augmentation can improve quality of life, but the line changes when the tech touches identity, thought, or the brain.

• Don’t Touch The Brain: One of the sharpest moments asks whether a person is still fully themselves if AI starts changing how they think, decide, or experience the world.

• Smart Devices Know More Than We Notice: Watches, glasses, cars, and home tools can help people, but they also create deeper tracking, dependency, and behavioral influence.

• AI Is Being Humanized For A Reason: The more AI feels like a partner, assistant, or companion, the easier it becomes to trust, adopt, and eventually pay for.

• Human Work Still Has A Premium: The group wrestles with AI-generated music, movies, and art, and why people may value something less once they know a machine made it.

• Imperfection May Become Valuable: If AI can make polished media on demand, human-made work may become more valuable because it carries effort, experience, and authenticity.

• Brand Trust Will Shape AI Adoption: People may not understand the models, but they know brands. Google, OpenAI, LG, Meta, and others may win by making AI feel familiar and safe.

• Everyday People Are The Biggest Market: The biggest opportunity may not be developers or engineers, but normal people who need AI to solve daily pain points.

• AI Should Eliminate Pain, Not Replace Judgment: The strongest practical takeaway is to use AI where it removes friction, saves time, and supports the work people already need to do.

• The Real Question Is What We Give Access To: The episode keeps circling back to the tradeoff: when AI gets close enough to help, it may also get close enough to shape us.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded January 13th, 2026

Subscribe now

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

Share

Clint’s Insights

(My raw thoughts on this episode)

Read more

To My AI Amazement

My tasks are in chaos, 3 meetings down, 2 to go, and I’m finishing up an article.

In my head I’m thinking, “I MUST complete editing my video podcast today” and oh boy, did I go down a rabbit hole trying to make the clip automated.

My time was running out but I’m going to stay focus—I’m telling myself,

“finish the article, remember context switching is bad, but maybe, just maybe, it won’t hurt to ask AI, just 1 question, right?”

I chose Codex for this job and watch it “think…”

Watched it gather tools, then execute, more tools, over and over until it was done.

It delivered my clip in 3min.

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

3 Minutes — I Got Time Then

I got sucked into the trap—the thought of; if you can do this that fast, and had time to install all what you needed, then what about this?

My prompt went something like:

20 minutes? It took 3.

So, naturally I ask for more to use all of my time;

“Can you also put caption on the clips? What about an end screen? can you cut out the background?”

Sure, CapCut can do this, I don’t even know why I asked. 🤯

“…transcripts? horizontal to vertical? Can you find clips on your own by grabbing the timestamps, best moments, etc…”

10 more minutes pasted, I had 3 scripts.

At my 20 minute mark, I have 6 scripts and wondering,

“Should build an app?”

But then I caught myself—what problem are you solving?

I couldn’t answer, so I stopped.

Who Is Actually Using What You’re Building?

I had one simple problem: provide me a couple autonomous clips from my long form video.

The the “builders trap” caught me. I was trapped and I knew it.

Pondering on how I got here and why some builders like myself, struggle to ship then it hit me.

“Tools”

Everyone is building apps or AI Agents that live within the app—a matter of fact cloud platforms like Claude, Codex, Cursor have build it’s tools and access to them via connectors, MCP, plugins and well just extended capabilities.

And most of them little to no GUI, onboarding, React or hosting.

Just tools doing work.

Is The User A Human Or An AI Agent?

That should be the builder’s question…

And if it’s a human, carry on—we know how to build the human interface.

However, if it’s an AI agent, it’s probably smart to build what the agent needs.

Agents don’t need buttons, tooltips, forms, or progressive disclosure. They don’t even need graphic illustrations in their interface—at all.

AI Agents merely need to know how to do one thing reliably.

For the last couple of years, we all have been building, the entire agent infrastructure is already built.

Look at Claude, Codex, Cursor, and Antigravity all support tool and function calling natively—built right into the harness.

They’re RAG-ing knowledge, from everywhere including MCP which had 3,000+ published servers in its first 6 months. Developer adoption of AI agent frameworks grew 400% year over year in 2025.

Google then released A2A then CLI in Google Workspace, Notion, and Microsoft 365 all released AI Agent tools.

We’re here building multi-featured apps of all kind that get killed on the next Claude or Codex feature iteration.

The speed to build gap is closing, but that speed hasn’t been able to transfer into ROI—so, we all get forced to choose our favorite AI platform to build on top of.

Not a bad idea—but as builders, I’m sure we don’t want to be stuck into one. 😊

Look, these are clear early signals, you can see it without me spelling it out, all of big tech is not waiting, clearly, they’re already on the path to building AI tool capabilities with their tool offering.

Why not you?

The Agent Is The Computer

We’ve already seen Anthropic’s & OpenAI’s Computer Use (Operator) features.

It can do some really powerful things, such as navigating your browser windows and desktop apps—even with apps supporting AI cloud platforms.

These computers need tools to be efficient and reliable.

Every time an AI agent clicks a button instead of calling a tool, you’re just throwing away tokens—it’s all wasted, due to the 10–100x the compute cost of a direct function call.

If you can reliably solve one problem by enabling an agent, you’re set for the future.

Don’t build the next TikTok for builders.

Build the most used tools by TikTok—because TikTok uses AI. 😁

I Think I’ll Focus On Building More CLI and Scripts

My autonomous clip generation adventure, proves to me all we need to build is tools, give the AI agent a goal and GO!

Prompt: “here, the file [path] to the full mp4. transcript (optional). Get me the best clips for my brand.”

My AI Agent CLI Tools

• STT Transcription: Use Whisper to generate a timestamped transcript.

• Clip Discovery: Analyze transcript.txt to identify viral segments with specific start/stop times.

• Clip Editing: Remove original backgrounds, composite new ones, and optimize render settings.

• 16:9 to 9:16: Convert horizontal footage to vertical format using smart cropping/re-framing.

• Element Overlay: Burn in dynamic captions and attach a branded end screen.

• Batch Processing: Automate the full pipeline to process all identified clips in a single queue.

I orchestrated this with prompts, skills and tools references—note, agents like Codex also knows how to use it’s platform to complete all of this already and surely, it’s through the use of AI tools at the AI Agent fingertips.

Tools For AI Agents — But For Who, Though?

Processes in an organization hasn’t mature enough to alter SOPs and augmented AI Solutions. They’re either taking what Claude, Codex & Co-Pilot give them or hacking their way through it—due to no governing structure for AI implementation.

But as builders, small businesses have simple issues we can fix—start with a good prompt then a simple agent, as time evolves this agent will need more capabilities—tools.

But you can’t sell AI tools and CLI to small businesses! True, to them it’s all an “app” but to you it’s an AI Agent tool—start there.

Build a solution using AI + CLI + tools—this is the arms—optional interface, if they insists for admin or dashboard.

Done.

Before the popularity of AI, we started building by designing the GUI first, but now, if we can focus on the AI tools first, the interface writes its own spec once the tools exists.

SaaS is being unbundled—not dying, I think. Things like project management, CRM, and communication operations, will always be exactly here, where AI agents are most capable.

Tools will expire, coupled with an AI Agent orchestrator it can evolve.

Look At The Pie — Pick A Slice

A real solvable problem and start with the simplest approach.

A skill + a script (Claude can build) + a Cron—a scheduled task—solve 1 thing.

These online big wigs models won’t build a tool that monitors your specific website’s logs and texts you when something breaks—I will, ha.

The smaller the tool, the smaller the risk.

The faster it ships, the faster you learn—facts!

A badly built tool is recoverable in a day—a day, not 3 weeks of human UI feedback before you find out the core function was wrong.

One Agent

One tool.

One Function That Does One Thing Well

A simple flow;

Your agent uses the tool, you find the gaps, then you build the next one.

The portfolio and each AI tool grows into a full capability.

Shipped

I almost built an app but instead built a series of tools that I now use along with my Claude and Codex.

Happy Building—AI Tools.

What are you building?

Leave a comment

Research

1. “The Model Context Protocol” — Standardizing model-to-data connections.

2. Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 — 2025 developer trends.

3. Google A2A Protocol — Agent-to-agent communication framework.

4. OpenAI Operator — Computer-using autonomous agent.

5. LangChain — LLM application framework.

6. CrewAI — Multi-agent orchestration platform.

7. AutoGen — Conversational multi-agent systems.

8. Unix philosophy — Modular, interoperable tool design.

9. Stripe API-first — Financial infrastructure via API.

10. Twilio developer-first — Communication building blocks.

11. a16z — AI-driven service economy.

Allow Me To Re-Introduce Myself

My name is Clint, oh, C for the Clarity,

Want to ship? You must want to talk to me.

I guess now, I sit between the build and responsibility,

Of being an entrepreneur of TWB, well TWM…

Fresh outta corp into trusting me, fully.

…haha 🤣

For real tho…

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Hello, Nice To Meet You

So, here’s my story.

It’s 2000, I’m wearing the cap and gown, smiling. I did it.

I didn’t want a plain CS degree nor did I want a MIS degree either—I was too hungry and wanted more. One was too technical and the other too business-ey—plus, I had already decided on my minor being business.

So, I landed what felt like he middle—Computer Information Systems.

This decision put me in the software engineering building and the business building, all at the same time.

I looked for others like me—but I was the only idiot that did that.

C++ on one side then Accounting, COBOL, business strategy on the other.

Both buildings, 2 knowledge streams, 2 personas and a single person trying to hold them simultaneously—me.

I thought everyone did something similar.

Surprise! No one did.

And I would spend the next twenty years learning exactly what that meant.

Names Are Important — What's yours?

After walking in the heat with printed CVs and several rejections later, my first job out of college was software support—not a bad start.

I was taking calls from angry customers, had 90sec to close—20mins ceiling. The goal given—get them to accept an upgrade then get the hell off the call.

I failed every time, I stayed on the phone too long and tried to actually fix the problem—I got written up for caring about the wrong metric.

Well, that didn’t fit me—ya, think?

What followed was a rollercoaster ride, from leading implementation on teams, then contracting as an entrepreneur, then development as a software engineer, then leadership as a manager. Every role, same position—in the middle

Not just a specialist builder, kinda a translator.

Business people who didn’t understand technology were just lost, while engineers who didn’t understand business were building systems that didn’t match users.

I was sitting in the middle, again, and again. I thought, is this punishment of knowing too much?

While in the chaos of trying to find my way—with young children and a job I didn’t like that much—I made a pact with my younger self: when my kids came of age, I was going back to entrepreneurship.

Fast forward…

AI is dominating, everyone and their momma is a founder, startups are everywhere, all while the world is on fire—and what a time to be a founder, right?

So, What Do You Do — Again?

If I have to answer that question one more time, haha.

I’ve learned, if you cannot say what you do in one clear through-line, you’ll be eaten alive.

This force reflections: As an early founder who hadn’t shipped much yet, an engineer learned on the job who are ready to make a leap to ownership, a leader who see too many paths and can’t stopped thinking like a builder.

You are capable in every room, yet stuck between all of them.

To find my way on this journey, I found GitHub Copilot trials show a 55.8% increase in task completion speed using AI, solo-founded AI startups went from 23.7% of new companies in 2019 to 36.3% by mid-2025, and a full solopreneur AI stack now costs $3,000–$12,000 annually.

The gap between vision and execution—the one I spent 20+ years living in—has closed dramatically.

But here’s what everyone is realizing.

AI closing that gap doesn’t reduce the energy requirement, it actually intensifies it—by a whole lot.

Because now, differentiation doesn’t come from who can build—anyone can.

It’s now focused on who can think clearly about what to build, stay discipline on the path and actually ship a solution to a real problem—fast.

That’s good taste, clear vision, and a defined distribution path.

All of which dependent on a very clear mind.

Do You Have The Energy For This?

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz spent two decades studying elite performers and came back with one finding:

Knowledge workers, like us, switch between apps and tasks 1,192 times a day—that’s once every 24secs.

Every switch leaves attention residue that bleeds into the next task before the previous one is even closed—wow.

Think about that, when people call during your juggling of tasks hours because it’s convenient for them—they pull hours of conversation for their benefit without thinking about what it costs you, cause why?

Those are free withdrawals from your energy reserve that is certainly not unlimited, but it serves them well—reasons to protect your time as a builder.

For two decades I was the translator in rooms where nobody wanted a translator—I can’t be the only one.

That’s just who I was—not self-identified, history-proven. But I was doing it while running down a reserve I never thought to protect in all roles.

McKinsey found executives in flow states are 500% more productive and what breaks that is dysfunction, impression management and some relationships that cost more than they return.

Finding your tribe—the people who support your growth while pushing back, even when you argue.

That is not isolation at all, it’s really just finding your real team—the difference between attractors to the mission and detractors from it.

Built In Breaks + Balance of The 4 Energy

I’m back running 2 miles every 2 days or so—I fall off sometimes, but I’m back, with some meditation too.

As a builder we have to think like a runner; they don’t push hard the whole race. They plan when to push on the hills, when to hold on the flat, when to grab that cup of water every mile, and when to let the heart rate recover before the next surge.

That’s energy strategy.

And every accomplishment is WINS—Will Identify Next Steps.

Pick small slices, have a definition of done on those slices and let your wins breathes dopamine into the next step.

Stick to your principles and core values—prevent burnout by forcing yourself to take breaks, have a clear path towards shipping that mvp, and do not waste time on people who have a problem with you that you cannot resolve.

Your vision is the end goal and your mission should be adaptive toward that vision—move with intent, more now in the AI era than ever before.

I’ve Been Trying To Find You

What I intend for this publication is to help reveal what happens when a builders stops fighting the middle—it’s who you are—and starts working from the insights gained from it.

If you’re like me and still stuck between engineer and leader or any space-between and are very driven by the possibilities of AI—let’s connect.

If you’re ok building systems alongside other founders, leaders, engineers, and entrepreneurs trying to keep their momentum—I want you here.

If sometimes the fog creeps in and willing to push for clarity through the systematic balance of energy through one conversation for the purpose of delivering value—that’s what these articles, this podcast, this ongoing story are for.

Being stuck between two worlds felt like a problem early on for me, but was never the real problem, it was only the signal.

The engineer who understands the business and the founder who can still build.

If you feel any of this, we’ll have a similar start.

Follow along leave a comment.

Let’s talk

Let’s ship.

…And I can try to change but that’s just where I am now,

Man, you was who you was ‘fore you got here

Only The Energy can judge me, so I’m gone

Either love me or leave me alone

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

Which version of this is YOU?
Drop your story

Leave a comment

Research Notes

1. Loehr, J. & Schwartz, T. — “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” — Harvard Business Review

2. Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. — Scarcity research — Behavioral Scientist

3. Leroy, S. — Attention residue research — University of Washington Bothell

4. Peng, S. et al. — GitHub Copilot productivity study — arXiv

5. Context switching statistics 2026 — Speakwise

6. Social energy research — PsyPost

7. State of Micro-SaaS 2025 — Freemius

8. Neuroscience of decision fatigue — Global Council for Behavioral Science

In this episode, David, Hassan, Tony, Keven and I unpack the AI chip race from the builder’s point of view.

What’s up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I’m Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Why local AI may be more about cost shifting than privacy, why small businesses should care more about useful services than chip hype, how GPU burnout and vendor risk could affect the tools we rely on, and why the next AI advantage may come from infrastructure, education, and energy instead of another model launch.

The AI Chip Impact

• Local AI Isn’t Just About Security: On-device AI is often pitched as safer and more private, but the hidden incentive may be offloading compute, battery drain, and power cost from the provider onto the user.

• The Real AI Bottleneck Is Power: The conversation moves from chips to electricity, transformers, infrastructure, and the uncomfortable reality that scaling AI may be harder than simply buying more GPUs.

• Specialized Chips Are Not Just Faster CPUs: GPUs, TPUs, AMUs, CPUs, and FPGAs get broken down in practical terms, including why specialized processors behave more like fixed paths than open city streets.

• NVIDIA May Not Be The Only Winner: NVIDIA dominates the public conversation, but manufacturing capacity, TSMC, Apple’s Arizona chips, and specialized chip pipelines may shape the real long-term leverage.

• Small Businesses Don’t Need Chip Hype: For builders, the question is not which chip powers the model. The question is whether the AI service helps you move faster, ship better, and avoid depending on fragile vendors.

• AI Is A Better Partner Than Boss: One of the strongest takeaways: the winners use AI for efficiency and force multiplication, while the losers try to use it as a blunt replacement for people and processes.

• The AI Chip Boom Has A Burnout Problem: The episode digs into the claim that heavily used NVIDIA chips may be burning out faster than the financial models assume, raising questions about the true cost of AI infrastructure.

• Vendor Risk Is A Builder Problem: If AI startups are purchased, folded in, or propped up by larger companies, small businesses depending on those services may inherit instability they never planned for.

• Privacy-Sensitive Companies Should Slow Down: Financial, legal, and regulated industries may need to think twice before dumping sensitive data into AI tools just because Copilot or another platform makes adoption easy.

• Data Centers Need Power And Water: AI infrastructure is becoming a local issue. Electricity bills, water use, cooling needs, and community pushback may decide where the next wave of AI actually gets built.

• The AI Race Is Also An Education Race: The ending widens the conversation from chips to national competitiveness, China, demographics, and whether education systems are preparing people for the AI economy.

• Ireland As A Tech Education Model: Ireland’s long-term investment in education becomes a useful contrast: infrastructure matters, but talent pipelines may decide who benefits from AI over the next 20 to 30 years.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded December 30th 2025

Subscribe now

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

Share

Clint’s Insights

(My raw thoughts on this episode)

Read more

AI Will Get You To Burnout Faster

Burning out sneaks in when you’re vibe coding and even faster when you’re context switching—the importance of having built-in-breaks and something like my rest week.

I want them all—I heard a little voice in my mind say—all the AI Coding tools.

Then the voice said “build them all.”

Excited, I jump on board and started on the grind, solve a problem, fill the gap, trust the process, keep going—locked in.

One of the apps I was building is a kinda of tasks manager—soon I realized I was overloaded and stopped on all of them.

Made a “manage my energy” contract with myself and focus on building just 1 app.

My Personal PM Flow.

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Prioritize What Brings Value—Now!

I had no time to waste as I filled my mind with urgency and that sent me down a spiral.

I asked myself: “what is the 1 problem that I have, that I can solve right now?”

Answering that question allowed me to see that I was switching, between Notion for notes, Freecamp for tasks, and Google Workspace for everything else.

3+ tools, 3 workflows, 3 places & also attempting to build 3 apps using 3 different AI tools—my brain begun to merge context, the fog kicked in all while I thought I was being productive.

Not like I didn’t know that context switching costs 23 minutes of recovery time per interruption.

But my internal urgency to feel productive while moving constantly made me felt that I was a master of GTD.

Then the solution came to me: I can build something to solve this chaos—and it’s 1 of the 3 things I’m already building, just get that to ship.

A Simple Slice

I learned the problem is that most people never defined what simple looks like for their process—and this time it was me.

When you don’t have a simple process, you optimize for motion instead of progress.

You end up doing like me and open Notion, then Freecamp, then Gmail, then back to Notion, then Calendar—don’t forget those notifications that just popped up.

6 hours later you’ve touched everything and finished nothing.

The Zeigarnik Effect is real—unfinished tasks don’t stay in the app, they follow you.

They sit in your working memory while you’re eating, while you’re on a call, while you’re trying to sleep.

You carry the weight of everything open.

A simpler process that tells you, clearly, what done looks like and then gets out of your way, is the clarity you need.

A Focus Build

That’s what my Personal PM Flow gave me, a clear constraint with a timer and 1 active task.

I now had a place where everything lived and when I sat down every morning and looked at my “For You” page, I knew exactly what I was doing that day and what I hadn’t finished yesterday.

The decision to build a tool to manage my projects, my burnout, and help me ship my other builds was the clarity I needed.

When you know what you’re building, why it matters, and what “shipped” looks like

You stop spiraling and start moving.

Here’s What I Learned

Building the tool was itself a distraction. I started Personal PM Flow while I was already building 2 other apps.

That’s 3 projects running in parallel—which is exactly the problem I was trying to solve.

I stopped, picked 1 and commit.

Personal PM Flow became the tool that allowed me to ship the other 2.

The burnout alerts are dismissible—discipline matters here too.

The app fires a soft alert when I’m approaching my daily limit—then a hard block.

The atomic habit I had to build was to abide by the rules that I set.

I had ignored both alerts, after I started to use the app, but then the reporting I built showed me a 78-hour week 😳—how could I argue with the data report that I built for this reason.

You can’t blame that on someone else, cause it hits home—hard.

I still have a backlog and missing features like biweekly recurrence, it’s local so no mobile, I want AI agent integration but all that lives in my head.

Every one of those things is a potential distraction—and I know it.

The discipline is in the decision to keep an active backlog of items that doesn’t block me.

The Definition of Done problem is real for solo builders.

On a team, the stakeholders and project manager defines done—the ticket get closed, the PR merges, the sprint ends.

But solo?

You are the builder, the PM, the sponsor, and the change manager—no one stops you from gold-plating or scope creep.

You have to be your own change manager and most of us were never trained for that role.

You’re in every role—which means every role can expand, and none of them have a stopping point unless you define one.

Stack Overflow surveyed 65,000 developers and guess what? Burnout isn’t a personal failure—it’s a builder’s industry condition.

The management culture says go, go, go.

The consultant culture says bill more.

The indie culture says ship more.

While, you’re not getting taught how to stop.

What Is In This Vibed App?

Personal PM Flow was vibe coded with Antigravity and Claude code. It runs locally with Next.js, React Server Components, SQLite—a simple setup.

Key features:

• Single active timer: Enforced at the database layer. You physically cannot run 2 timers as a constraint.

• Carryover: Unfinished tasks surface in a “For You” feed every morning. Batch-move with undo.

• Burnout prevention: I have a burnout events table that logs every overage and snooze. The app knows how many times I ignored the alerts—that goes in the reports.

• Recurring tasks: Daily, weekly, monthly. Auto-spawn on completion—forgot bi-weekly but not blocking, so it’s in the backlog.

• Focus Mode: Workspace and project context scoped to a hook that follows you through the session. So, I can see Focused Projects/Programs and Tasks.

• Status: Open, done & deferred.

• Many regression tests: All scripted to run before every commit and /skill.md to prevent bugs that resurface after AI fixed them.

It’s not perfect it might be accessible everywhere in the house, but not on my iPad or any mobile define—so future work, ONLY if I have that need.

What’s next (when I’m ready):

• MVP2: task duplication, bulk actions

• MVP3: variance dashboard, estimates vs. actuals, CSV export

• MVP4: reminders, daily carryover auto-run

• MVP5: read-only calendar imports (Google, Outlook)

• MVP6: device sync, backup + restore UI

The foundation is clean enough to support all of it, but right now, it doesn’t need to.

Right now it just needs to help me ship.

What Have You Ship?

I have dreams of making it a full blown mobile app—but considering just pushing it as it to github.

If any of this sounds familiar, from the tool-switching, the 70-hour weeks, the backlog that keeps growing.

I’d genuinely like to know.

And if you want the technical breakdown: Check out my Technical Log

Are you stuck in the loop, or have you found your version of simple?

Leave a comment

Research

1. Multitasking: Switching Costs — American Psychological Association

2. The Zeigarnik Effect — Psychology Today

3. Developer Burnout: Causes, Warning Signs, and Ways to Prevent It — Jellyfish Engineering

4. 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey — Stack Overflow

5. Deliberately Shipping Imperfect Code — Christoph Aigner, Medium

6. Top Five Causes of Scope Creep — Larson & Larson, PMI

7. Best Time Tracking Software for Consultants — Toggl Blog

In the last couple weeks, I did something new, something I’ve been avoiding doing.

I joined someone else’s live. 😳

Khadejah J over at StoryCraft invited me on to talk about breaks, burnout, and what it actually looks like to build sustainably when you’re doing it alone.

No script, we just had a conversation.

Story Craft Online Writing

I want you to be able to make a profit writing online while also mixing it with great storytelling--which will set you apart from the rest.

By Khadejah J

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

OMG, I’m LIVE!

The conversation was great—Khadejah asks the right questions. I was a bit nervous; “what can I say about burnout?” So, what came out of my mouth surprised me—I just shared my private mental models with strangers. 😱

That’s what we’re all here for right?

It was technically rest week, so I didn’t prepare—I jus showed up and had a conversation. Honestly, I had fun and just might do it again.

You should watch it to get the real juice but here’s what’s surfaced in the video: I’ve been running many systems for 6 months—some mental and some frameworks that I’ve never written down or named in detail publicly.

Here’s My 3 Callouts

The 4-week cycle

For 2 weeks I go in hard—building, writing, researching, shipping.

Week 3 I taper: watching what landed, analytics, energy, adjusting, not adding to the pile—that’s happening right now, the week I’m posting this.

Week 4 is rest and reflection—it’s not a vacation, I just do considerably less.

I still have meetings, coaching calls, commitments already on the calendar.

My rule: don’t add anything, whatever isn’t already there, let it wait.

Purposeful Distraction.

We are so caught up in being focused, we don’t force ourselves to take breaks in hustle culture, so consider Purposeful Distraction as a fun built in break.

1. You have to genuinely enjoy it

2. It can’t be related to what you’re currently building

3. You have to put a time limit on it

For me, I use first-person shooters—quick hit, natural end, nothing to do with code or writing.

If you’re deep in tech, your distraction can’t be tech.

That’s the whole point.

My Favorite Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The concept that lives in my head after reading the book several times is the two-system model.

• System 1: is your impulse; the fast, automatic response that fires before you’ve had a chance to think—the answer is at the tip of your tongue.

• System 2: is the deliberate brain; the one that slows down, checks System 1, and asks: should I actually say that? Should I actually do that?

Burnout doesn’t announce itself—but what if, System 2 has been telling you but you’ve not been listening cause System 1 says go go go.

My wife and my kids reinforce my System 2—really, most times they start before. “you’re working too much!”

How could I even argue back, when all systems and loves ones are saying the same thing.

Checkout: Story Craft Online Writing

Rest week begins next week. Then New articles, Fire Talks continuing, and continuing the build.

For now please go and checkout Khadejah J publication, she promotes staying consistent with writing and a great connector of Experts.

Story Craft Online Writing

I want you to be able to make a profit writing online while also mixing it with great storytelling--which will set you apart from the rest.

By Khadejah J

Did You Miss This? — Last 2 Weeks:

Story Craft Online Writing

How to Take a Break When You're Creating/Building Online with Clint Cain

Clint and I had a GREAT conversation…

Listen now

3 months ago · 6 likes · Khadejah J and Clint Cain

Fire Talk 🔥 Podcast Episodes

Recent Posts

Recent Technical Log

Tech Wing Management

Are You Talking to AI Like a Caveman? — #4 Signals FF

I saw a post about ‘caveman’ prompting to save you tokens…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Clint Cain

How Didn’t I Know About That?

Hello subscribers, thanks for staying with me on this journey.

The last 2 weeks were a lot.

Rest week wasn’t really a rest week.

I did a live, had a guest at my home, and ran out of time the week before rest week.

So, I end up editing videos on what was supposed to be my off days—I know!

I dread editing sometimes. Mostly because of fundamentals I just didn’t know.

I use CapCut and I’ve been watching every clip at normal speed just to edit it— which is painful slow.

Today years old. lol 😂

Writing “What Is Shipped Anyway” I really enjoyed—the writing, the curation, the entire process.

Here’s my reminder to you as a builder:

Even when everything fluctuates—motivation, momentum, income—the needle is still moving constantly. So, if you feel progress, know that your process is working—trust it.

And go all the way to done.

My Word This Week: Impetus!

Leave a comment

What Is The Real Focus?

I built a AI project manager app to manage the AI projects that wasn’t finished—I mean, it was also to keep an eye on all projects, really.

But after I built the dashboard feature list of all projects, I had to sit for a second.

The only thing better than a folder full of half-built things, was now it was color coded and everything in ‘red’ really brought something to light.

These were “boss” ideas that I believed in “Vibed Code” I was proud of, and instead of focus on shipping one, I built a tool to help me organize why I wasn’t.

It felt productive but it wasn’t—not at all.

Psst… that AI Project Manager app—still not finished.

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

How Are You Not Finished Yet?

I felt a bit defeated after the reality slapped me in the face. I kinda felt stuck and had to get clarity from my own words:

“you’re not stuck because you don’t have enough time, or right tools, or the right ideas, it’s all because you never defined what done looks like.”

For sure, without that, every project lives in a permanent state of almost.

I’ve shipped 2 apps within the last few weeks—well one is an AI agent harness—but both are real, works, and I learned more about finishing in those 2 builds than in years of building before them.

Not because I got smarter and solo, but only because I finally made up my mind to be disciplined enough to stop at the marks I defined.

Here’s what else I figured out.

The Graveyard Of Projects

If you’re anything like me and have been building for any length of time, especially with AI; you have a folder, or somewhere you have a list of everything you’ve started—for some, that’s in your head, how?🤯

Maybe it’s GitHub repositories with 3 commits, voice memos about ideas, notion, or the best ones are the projects you started with a burst of energy and then quietly stopped touching.

That list is your learning library, not a sign of failure. Look, some of those projects taught you exactly what they were supposed to teach and that includes a legitimate definition of done: I learned what I needed to learn. Boom.

But some of those projects?

They’re stalled for a different reasons entirely and that’s what we’re going to talk about.

AI Did, Make It Worse

Here’s the thing, AI didn’t just make building faster—I mean really, really fast—it also made scope creep personal.

Before AI, the stakeholders at your company added features. Now, it’s you!

Come on, AI can complete 20 features you just came up with 2 hours ago in 30 mins. That surely makes you feel like you have to come up with 20 more.

The constant feeling of building, building, building—and we know what that leads to?

burnout!

Then as a solo you have the fear that what you’re releasing won’t be perfect—the enemy of good enough.

Constant worry that people will talk, that the code has security holes, that you’re not doing enough due diligence or it’s not going to sell.

All of this existed before AI—so why does it feel louder now?

In the competitive world of programming—and it is competitive—it used to be about who had the best code, who was fastest, who’s that bad-ass engineer?

Now, it’s who have the domain knowledge and industry expertise to do the due diligence.

From writers, project managers to technicians, sr. engineers are all vibe coding with Claude watching their token count—because, it is your productivity score.

The new anxiety that now sits on top of an old one.

You get it, ok but one more, that annoys me the most; as they thinker with pricing of tokens—for anyone that uses public AI platforms—AI now forgets right along with you.

You have to pay more for longer context windows, promised accuracy, access to correctness & zero days fixes—the new bar.

They Got Me Too

The deadline came for my reduce usage or get the $100-$200 plan. I didn’t read the emails—I was too busy building—until my normal 2 hours run of tokens, was done in 30 mins.

Then the dumb effects:

2 days before I needed to deliver a beta of my bookkeeper app, I asked Claude to make a copy of the application and put it in my pipeline.

So far so good, until I restarted the app, to notice that Claude had deleted my database—just the data, it’ wasn’t user-specific and was very recoverable—but I had to start my testing all over again—a delay I didn’t want.

When asked, “I’m sorry, my bad”

I was mad for a bit until I realized, that was all me not having the right foundation the right structure.

And this is a major reason projects get stuck.

This was a simple hurdle not an actual blocker—if so, I’d be screwed.

Here’s What I Learned

I thought I knew it all—I’m human and I make mistakes too—especially when productivity feels, great.

So, I paused for a quick review of things I thought to reframe my objective.

Here’s what I’ll share with you: blockers vs hurdles.

These are some guardrails to keep momentum, along with some foundational structure.

Scope creep—52% of all projects fail from uncontrolled scope expansion. When you’re solo—building at home—you’re the only stakeholder, this means you’re also the biggest risk—meeeee!

Then there’s no change control process—mental or otherwise written down—projects don’t finish.

This one is key: A definition of done (DoD)—your defined happy path—without it, how would you keep things moving?

Context switching—don’t do like me and try to manage multiple projects, you’re bleeding up to 40% of your productive output by just switching—I was jumping between the AI agent harness and the bookkeeper app.

Fear of judgment—they say 65% of founders report imposter syndrome—I know I do. But why worry about that when you have to worry about tokens—you got 0 likes anyways. 🤣

How about the “one more bug” trap—just stop!

It’s good enough, consult your DoD.

Financial pressure, is a real blocker not a hurdle—every founder has this wall. If money is the constraint, no framework fixes it.

Name it. Deal with it separately.

I Actually Shipped

The AI Agent harness wasn’t built to break records or be an openClaw.

It wasn’t a real product at all, I just wanted to build it so that when I’m working with agent frameworks in the future, I know exactly what to look out for.

That was my entire scope.

That was the DoD: understand the technology enough to use it!

I built it and I got it to GitHub as an open-source project.

I documented where I left off, then moved on.

The bookkeeper app was a bit different. This was for a client, with a real deadline, not based on features, just beta. I’m sure I’m over delivering, I had to stop myself from adding features like if it’s going to be the next quickBooks.

Nonetheless, got it to beta, and I’m in the process of handed it to the client.

They’ll be using it by the time you read this.

That’s shipped!

It Wasn’t Easy

AI is now in a place where it has removed all the legitimate excuses for a lot of the things that used to block builders.

You can’t say it’s too hard anymore.

You can’t say it takes too long.

You can’t say you don’t know where to start.

But AI added new ones.

The vibe coding hangover is for real—taking a break and coming back is a uphill battle, not to mention the drain on the train.

In 2025 everyone was learning to build fast, I’d say slow down in 2026 but make sure and ship.

There’s real challenges of moving too fast—45% of AI-generated code contained vulnerabilities. Maybe, just maybe your background in “tech” can help, but checking your work or having someone else do will certainly help.

The answer isn’t to stop trusting using AI, it’s more about coordinating your efforts better with it—while balancing your energy.

I remembered while working on a team shipping fast was hard because coordination with humans is a bottleneck. Legal is slow, security & architecture reviews take weeks, stakeholder alignment is a project within itself, but as a solo builder, you are in charge of all of it.

Shipping is only blocked by you!

Just define what “ship is”.

Becoming an indie deliver-er is the identity shift I’m talking about—it’s what I had to do—replace the love of my idea with the love of what my idea delivers—to the client, users, and to your own momentum.

This is not easy, I know it begins with a mindset shift—making progress is enough and your graveyard isn’t a failure at all it’s clearly your learning library.

That’s the whole thing.

That’s what it’s about.

I Struggled But I Got Through It

Neither of my projects are perfect but both of them now exist in the world and do something real for someone.

Here’s my recap:

Write your Definition of Done (DoD) before you vibe a line—not after, before!

Write it down. Sign it. Hold it.

Use MoSCoW—something I picked up at my old jobs.

If it’s not a Must, it doesn’t ship in v1—not optional. This is the only way to stop yourself from adding what you can build instead of what you need.

Map the happy path only—and some edge cases.

ROV before ROI—You won’t know the Return On Investment until someone’s using it. But Return On Value you get now—If you were working for someone, then you’ll have no choice to focus on ROI.

Slow down to ship fast—built in breaks and smaller work.

Build in public if you can—I’m still getting used to this. Social proof and community change the dynamic.

If you don’t have your DoD, you will not have clarity on your projects scope—a recipe for feeling stuck with stalled projects.

Thank you for reading,

I hope this was helpful to keep you moving on that awesome project, but tell me, what does done look like for the projects sitting in your folder?

Leave a comment

Write down your DoD today, before you start the next project!

I’ve linked my projects referenced in the article, if I miss something please let me know, otherwise, ship it!

Research Notes

Scope Creep / Project Completion / MVP / Shipping Philosophy / AI Productivity / Vibe Coding / Imposter Syndrome / Fear of Judgment / Definition of Done / Agile Solo Founder / Builder Reality

1. What Is Scope Creep — 5 Ways to Avoid It
   https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/5-ways-to-avoid-scope-creep

2. Scope Creep in Design Projects 2026

   https://dardesign.io/blog/scope-creep-design-projects-2026

3. Complete 2026 Guide to Scope Creep

   https://pmpwithray.com/blogs/what-is-scope-creep-in-project-management-your-complete-guide/

4. Scope Creep: What It Is and How to Manage It

   https://aliresources.hexagon.com/enterprise-project-performance/scope-creep-what-it-is-and-how-to-manage-it

5. Ultimate Guide to Indie Hacking 2025

   https://createsell.com/blog/indie-hacking

6. Great Minimum Viable Products: Examples and Best Practices

   https://www.indiehackers.com/article/great-minimum-viable-products-examples-and-best-practices-e0729bd5a3

7. The Indie Hacker Cycle That Leads to Nowhere

   https://echopointglobal.com/the-indie-hacker-cycle-that-leads-to-nowhere-build-fast-fail-forever/

8. Top 100 Developer Productivity Statistics with AI Tools 2026

   https://www.index.dev/blog/developer-productivity-statistics-with-ai-tools

9. Vibe Coding 2026: Complete Developer Guide

   https://lushbinary.com/blog/vibe-coding-developer-guide-ai-first-development/

10. 2026: The Vibe Coding Hangover

    https://www.elektormagazine.com/articles/2026-an-ai-odyssey-vibe-coding-hangover

11. AI Coding Is Now Everywhere — MIT Technology Review

    https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1128352/rise-of-ai-coding-developers-2026/

12. 2026 AI Trends: Vibe Coding and Agents Will Kill Traditional Startups

    https://medium.com/@ehan01969/2026-ai-trends-why-vibe-coding-and-agents-will-kill-traditional-startups-eb69729d5e8f

13. How to Secure Vibe Coded Applications in 2026

    https://dev.to/devin-rosario/how-to-secure-vibe-coded-applications-in-2026-208d

14. Imposter Syndrome for Creators

    https://www.automateed.com/imposter-syndrome-for-creators

15. Small Business Mindset Blocks: Imposter Syndrome, Perfectionism & Fear

    https://www.bigbadmarketing.com/blog/small-business-mindset-blocks

16. What Is the Definition of Done in Agile

    https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/definition-of-done

17. ROI vs ROV

    https://cast.app/roi-vs-rov

18. Solo Founders Report 2025

    https://carta.com/data/solo-founders-report/

    The Delicate and Destructi

Share

In this episode, David, Egan and Hassan join me to talk about, my “cool buddy”, why the most powerful developers are “firing” ChatGPT in favor of Claude’s and how a fly-fishing guide is using AI to build a massive industry platform.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded December 16th 2025

More on the “Yes Man”, break down the “Trash Compactor” reality of context windows, the secret hardware war between Google and Amazon (AMUs).

The "Trash Compactor" Infrastructure Wars

• Gemini’s Japanese Quirk: A raw look at the weird hallucinations happening in the latest audio models.

• Claude vs. The Rest: Why leadership-level users prefer Claude’s ability to fact-check and challenge the user instead of just providing “confirmation bias.”

• “Spinal Tap” Coding: Moving beyond the “Amplifier” framework to build massive codebases without hitting the five-hour token limit.

• The Skills Revolution: How progressive loading of “Skills” (MD files) is replacing the traditional long-form prompt.

• AMUs vs. GPUs: The terrifying burnout rate of Nvidia chips and why Google is winning the hardware war with specialized processors.

• The Agentic Suite: A tour of the 2026 toolkit—Cove, Pomelli, Lindy, and why “Progressive Disclosure” is the secret to UX design. A list of the 23 AI Tools Discussed In Video.

• The Fly-Fishing ERP: How a veteran tech exec is using AI to disrupt the outdoor guide industry.

• Local LLM Audit: The top three models you can run on your laptop today (Llama 3.1 8B, Coderol 22B, and GPTOSS 20B).

What's up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I'm Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can't quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

David Seholm | AI Entrepreneur
Cultivating and inspiring teams to achieve more!

Where they are most active: LinkedIn

Egan Jones | AI Consultant, CEO, Value Creator @ SuperFluidic.AI
Seeing the Future, Deep and Wide Problem-Solving Skillset

Where they are most active: Occasionally on LinkedIn, superfluidic.ai

Hassan Faggett | Grant Consultant, Barber, Connector
Be the player their coach warned them about

Where they are most active: SubStack, LinkedIn

Did you get that project shipped?

Share

Read more

It’s Rest Time

If you’re not resting, your work will reflect it. Next week is my rest-week and I’ll exhale, read, watch and like. This week was intense for me—good thing I stopped and actually looked at what got done

That gave me the motivation I needed.

I shipped something. Just a “skill” pushed it to GitHub—it’s live, done, not perfect, but done.

Did you ship something?

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Progress IS a WIN!

If you did ship something, celebrate it—do it now, I’ll celebrate with you: Congratulations 🎉

Outside of daily context switching, the building chaos, the war and politics pulling at your attention in every direction—you have to give yourself credit.

Small wins matter. My skill shipped and that partnership I mentioned a few weeks back? It evolved. I’m now building a standalone app to help with accounting and bookkeeping during tax season.

A real problem, building a real solution.

That’s what happens when you stop pitching and start asking the right questions—a habit I’m still working on.

My project management app hit a good MVP stopping point. I’m actually using it every day without tweaking it—it fits my mental model on how I work.

It’s not finished, but finished enough to breathe, call it a phase and call it shipped too. WIN! 🎉

Yes, I had the feeling lol. The whole time, the urge was there—switch tools, add a feature, chase the new idea.

I actually wrote 2 articles about that exact situation and how I handled it—see below.

I needed balance—for my mental—so, I got out of the house, away from staring at my computer all week, and went to a networking event.

The room was full of technical leaders—VPs, CTOs, Directors, Engineering managers—all trying to figure out the same thing: What do we actually do with AI, and how do we get our teams to ship with it instead of just talk about it?

These are the people at big tech that solo builders think are ahead of them.

They’re not.

The solo builders are grinding at home—even on the weekends—figuring things out in real time, shipping and failing and shipping again—that’s the cutting edge.

The boardroom is scraping and “clawing” 🦞 to catch up to what you’ve been living every day.

Still think you’re behind?

The News Proves It

Here’s what caught my eye in the new: ~55,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 and most of them are engineers. Tech Layoff Tracker

I even saw a post on LinkedIn from a tech leader saying “We don’t need junior engineers anymore, we got AI.”

Wow 😳

The leaders are AI-biased, confused, displacing engineers and just lost.

So, the ones who figure out how to build, lead and ship, are going to be the ones who matter most in the next few years.

That’s us!

We’re all juniors in this

…And that’s who’s not behind.

In case you missed these from the last two weeks:

Tech Wing Management

Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity — Which To Use?

What Is The Real Problem…

Read more

3 months ago · 2 likes · Clint Cain

We Agree — You’re NOT Behind

You are capable and do feel stuck sometimes.

Take a break, pause then look at what you’ve accomplished in a week.

It shows you’re focused: one project, one track and one conversation closer

I’ve been on the software engineering and leadership track as a builder—with people and teams: see my LinkedIn

If you want to talk about it, join my chat, or send me a DM.

That’s exactly what I’m here for.

Thank you for supporting my work

If you want more—wanna explore how we can work together?

Let's Go Deeper

Clarity for the capable but stuck — 1 bite at a time.

— Clint

Too Many Tools

I’m not here to tell you which AI coding tool wins. Everybody’s got an opinion on that. I’m here to tell you what actually happened when I tried to use all of them at once and what it cost me before I figured out what was really going on—don’t judge me, I was excited, OK 😊

Spoiler: it was never about the tools.

It never is.

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Getting My Hands Dirty

A couple months ago, I finally finished the setup of my new dev computer. I installed all the apps I think I needed, then I started building—the ideas started flowing fast.

I landed on 2 apps that I considered to be real solutions to solve real problems I actually have.

These were not planned to be side projects or prototypes that sit untouched for 6 months. They were actually planned to be real working applications with agentic AI workflows on the path to be published.

And then, I made a decision that felt smart at the time: “why pick one AI coding tool when you can use all of them?”

I had Claude, Gemini through my Google Workspace and OpenAI Codex.

I downloaded Antigravity on a whim. I even had Cursor sitting there—well, honestly it is a beautiful code editor but I barely touched it because I already had paid accounts with the others and I wanted to push those first.

For about a month I was grinding, switching between these tools, and when my tokens ran out—you know when the platform says stop or pay me!

I was jumping from project to project—sure, I could have been taking breaks during these “approval” moments but those were filled with answering calls and meetings in between.

The rest of the time was tracking bugs across 3 different environments. Oh man, did I feel productive as hell.

I wasn’t.

Oh Squirrel

You know, I was in builders mode.

You’re mid-build, on some feature, and it’s working, then you remember: oh, this other tool does this thing that I can add to this feature to make it better. Wait, what if my app could also do these other things that got suggested yesterday? Then, a notification pops up with a new tool that claims to solve all of your recent problems, so you hit the browser, open another new tab to join the stack of tabs already open, then you forget what you were doing in the beginning.

That’s Shiny Object Syndrome and it’s not new.

10 years ago that was at pace 5 for every builder, but now, with AI, it runs at pace 500—fast.

Because AI lowers the barrier to starting so dramatically that every new idea feels executable right now.

You’re not constrained by skill or time the same way anymore. So you start more. Branch more. Chase more.

I didn’t want to be in that trap, so trying to be clever, I created 1 of my apps to solve the folder problem.

You know the one every builder has—full of half-started projects, ideas that made sense at the time, repos with a README and nothing else.

I didn’t want the folder problem, so I built a whole Dev Command Center just to manage the chaos of everything I was spinning up and projects I already managed.

That’s how bad it got—I know, I built a project to manage my projects. 🤯

But remember those calls and meetings I mentioned earlier?

They have deliverables, so I also, created an app to manage that chaos while in deep in the chaos.

The problem with those was I was living in LIVE bug mode.

Normally you get mad and just move on, but now with AI?

It’s Fix fix fix.

A constant growing scope without a real end.

The Token Problem Was Never the Real Problem

Here’s what nobody tells you when you start diving deep on AI coding tools: you will run out of tokens faster than you think—the bigger the project, and of course, if you want the newest model, plan for tokens to go even faster.

It’s not the tools—they’re trying to solve the productivity problem.

It’s YOU, because you’re building something with real impact, not just asking for snippets and summaries but actually developing, debugging, iterating, and fighting your best friend: the context window.

A single React App component can eat 2,500 to 3,500 tokens.

Start asking the AI to hold a whole project in mind, reference your architecture docs, track your roadmap, keep your sanity check file loaded and you will surely burn through an hour of context before you know it.

So I thought I was brilliant and came up with the most genius plan:

When Claude runs out, jump to Codex. When Codex runs out, go to Antigravity. Rotate. Keep building. Never stop. LFG!

Genius, right?

No. I was building on 3 parallel tracks, juggling 2+ thought processes, while still doing client work, taking calls and trying to run a business.

I thought I was maximizing, but instead, I was fragmenting.

Research from UC Irvine shows it takes 23 minutes to fully rebuild focus after a single interruption.

I was interrupting myself every few minutes.

Voluntarily.

Self-imposed switching is the worst kind—because you can’t blame anyone else for it.

But yourself.

Tech Wing Management

Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity — Which To Use?

What Is The Real Problem…

Read more

3 months ago · 3 likes · Clint Cain

What Each Tool Actually Did

Let me give you my honest take since I’ve got opinions now.

Cursor: (honorable mention) I didn’t spend much time with it but the engineers I talk to who uses it swear by it and I get it. It’s clean, powerful editor with AI baked in. If you’re like me and have used VS Code you’ll feel at home. But what I’ve experienced from the others keeps me curious on if this tool will last.

Antigravity: Shocked me.😱 I watched it take a prompt, write code, open a browser, move a mouse, run tests in real time against a local server. There was a second cursor in my Chrome window that wasn’t mine OMG!—It was testing my app for me. I watched my screen get taken over in the best possible way. Pair programming with in browser Gemini, except your pair is an agent that doesn’t get tired and not afraid to hurt your feelings. Still the best example of pair programming I’ve seen. Period.

Codex: Underrated—probably more now due to political events, since this is OpenAI the makers of ChatGPT. Yet, the interface is its own thing—it’s not sitting on top of VS Code, it’s its own environment. You get the terminal and the diffs side by side. The way it sections your chats by project folder is smart. Follows your architecture docs (Skills). Respects the roadmap.

Claude: I’ll be honest. This is where I live. Not because I’m biased—ok I’m biased. But, for what I need—practical, daily, connected to real-world use cases—it delivers. Claude Sonnet 4.6 for everything. Opus when I need a big push on a hard problem. It’s not perfect but when it gets wonky I flip back and it corrects. The accuracy is different from the others for my workflow. Talking about a model that is not afraid of hurting feelings and strong push back—yep, Claude.

But none of that matters if you do what I did.

Pick one project.

One focus.

Resolve.

Can You Even Get Into Flow State When Vibe Coding?

Yep, this is a real question.

My answer right now is: Barely

Flow state requires one thing above everything else—sustained, uninterrupted focus on a single challenge.

When you’re vibe coding, the AI is doing most of the heavy lifting. Your job becomes: review, approve, prompt again, review, approve.

And in between each of those moments?

The temptation to switch kicks in, a strong urge to check something else, open another tab, start something new, because hey, AI is “just running”

That attention residue—the mental trace your brain leaves on the last thing you were doing—it never fully clears when you keep pulling yourself away.

You think you’re resting while the AI builds.

But you’re actually fragmenting.

The biggest drain of this new world of building obviously isn’t writing code.

It’s the mental overhead of tracking everything you have in motion.

The Real Lesson

80–90% of side projects never get finished—and honestly, kinda true for big tech AI projects too.

I’ve seen the stats, lived it before, and I thought AI could change that equation.

And it does but not in the way I expected. AI makes it easier to start and each day it becomes easier and easier.

For anyone who ever dreamed of building with code, well the reality is, now you actually can.

Which means you can start more projects, have more half-built progress competing for your attention, and don’t be surprised when you get exactly the outcome you were trying to avoid—everything in progress, nothing done, just busy.

It’s possible that you’ll still get burnt out from working too hard. And you’ll also get burnt out from working on too many things at once with AI.

Your energy is the resource. And it is finite, it’s precious, cherish it, use it wisely.

Here’s what I know to be true for me:

Every project I started—finished or not—still taught me something. That’s the key to compounding knowledge from both success and failure.

The architecture decision you made and abandoned. The pattern you tried that didn’t work.

All of that knowledge carries forward.

So when you begin again, you’re not starting from zero. Instead this time, you have to finish.

And to do that means protecting the one project you’re on right now—all the way past the finish line.

James Clear—author of Atomic Habits—said it better than I can: you don’t build results, you build habits.

In this new world of building, the habit to build is protecting your vision—a single track to the end.

Not the perfect project.

Or the best tool.

The one thing in front of you right now…

That MUST be finished.

What I’d Tell You Now

Pick your primary tool.

Make it the one that fits your workflow that matches your accounts, the features you want, your stack, and your budget.

Then use the others as overflow when you need it. Not as equals running parallel.

Load your project context every time using AI “Skills”: architecture doc, roadmap, changelog, readme, sanity check.

If the tool can’t read those and know what you’re building and where you’re at in progress, it doesn’t matter how good the model is.

Start small and ship small.

The projects you admire didn’t start polished, you just showed up after the hard part was invisible. So stop comparing your in-progress work to someone else’s finished product.

Build in public if you can stomach it—it terrifies me, but here I am.

A generous builder might give you the one tip you’re missing.

Your first version is supposed to be rough.

My first podcast episode was rough.

My first MVP was rough—that’s what alpha means.

Track your energy like you track your tokens and context window. When you’re running low; STOP.

The code/project will be there tomorrow.

I’m still building both apps. Moving faster now, because I have one primary track and I protect it.

That’s the thing AI can’t do for you.

When I realized I was overloaded with overproductivity, I did a tiny side quest and finished it all the way for motivation.

I created a tiny script that syncs Skills files across my Codex, Antigravity and Claude environments and published it as an open source project on GitHub.

Doesn’t matter if no one contributes.

It matters I finished.

Leave a comment

You’re one conversation closer to clarity

If you’re a builder and want the technical deep dive on how I structure projects across tools and what’s actually in my Skills files

See my technical notes article below. If not, I hope this article brought you some clarity.

Read More: Technical Notes Article

Research Notes

Context Switching / Side Projects, Never Finish / Toxic Productivity / Mental Health

1. Techical Log: My technical take on this article

   Tech Wing Management

   Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity — Which To Use?

   What Is The Real Problem…

   Read more

   3 months ago · 3 likes · Clint Cain

2. The Hidden Cost of Context Switching: Why Your Most Productive Hours Are Disappearing
   https://medium.com/@codewithmunyao/the-hidden-cost-of-context-switching-why-your-most-productive-hours-are-disappearing-43c5b501de19

3. Context Switching: The Silent Killer of Developer Productivity https://www.hatica.io/blog/context-switching-killing-developer-productivity/

4. Cost of Context Switching for Developer Workflow https://axolo.co/blog/p/cost-context-switching-developer-workflow

5. How Much Does Context Switching Cost Your Dev Team https://www.incredibuild.com/blog/how-much-does-context-switching-cost-your-dev-team

6. Context-Switching Is the Main Productivity Killer for Developers https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com/p/context-switching-is-the-main-productivity

7. Context Switching Costs for Developers
   https://super-productivity.com/blog/context-switching-costs-for-developers/

8. Side Projects and Why They Never Get Finished https://dev.to/zybersudo/side-projects-and-why-they-never-get-finished-2fk6

9. Why Developers Never Finish Their Projects
   https://medium.com/things-developers-care-about/why-developers-never-finish-their-projects-bf39d3424114

10. 5 Reasons Why Side Projects Never Get Finished
    https://web-highlights.com/blog/5-reasons-why-side-projects-never-get-finished/

11. The Hidden Cost of Always Being Productive https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unlock-your-true-motivation/202506/the-hidden-cost-of-always-being-productive

12. When Productivity Turns Toxic https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/07/10/when-productivity-turns-toxic-how-to-avoid-excessive-output-at-work/

Share

If you’ve felt like your AI assistants are hitting a ceiling, this conversation explains why we might be at the limit of what public models can do.

In this episode, we explore the transition from “chatting with a bot” to building production-grade infrastructure.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded December 2nd 2025

We look at the “Personality Quarks” of the latest models, why veteran developers are moving to Claude Code and Local LLMs, and the terrifying reality of Harvard students turning Meta glasses into instant doxing tools.

AI Developer’s New Playbook, Trends & The Privacy Crisis

• The 2-Day Conversion: How AI turned a 2-week React migration into a 48-hour win, and the reality of “production-grade” vs. “demo-grade” code.

• Personality Quarks: Analyzing the shift from GPT 5.0 to 5.1—why “cool buddy” filters might be making AI less useful for power users.

• The Skills Pattern: Moving beyond simple prompts to Markdown-based Skills and “Context Loading” to keep your AI agents on track.

• Ngrok & Local Tunnels: A guide to hosting local dev environments live on the web for instant collaboration without the “hacker-risk.”

• The Origin of “Grok”: A quick trip into sci-fi history—from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land to the spiritual level of understanding tech.

• Google Trends 2026: A live audit of what the world is searching for—why health and education are out-pacing developers in AI interest.

• The Doxing Goggles: How Harvard students turned Meta Ray-Bans and facial recognition into a privacy nightmare, and how to get yourself off those databases.

• The Nvidia Island: Why the entire AI industry is stranded on a single type of chip and what happens when the cash flow slows down.

• Law of Diminishing Returns: A debate on whether LLMs are just “Intelligent Mad Libs” and if we’ve officially hit the limit of pattern recognition.

• The Future of Human Truth: Closing thoughts on why honesty and community are the only things AI can’t replicate.

What's up, welcome to Fire Talk by Tech Wing Bites. I'm Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can't quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Fire Talk 🔥 Guest

| CEO of Hola Bili, AI Consultant
Skip the paperwork

---

Get Paid Fast

Where they are most active: BlueSky, X, Instagram, www.holabili.com

Share some insights with someone who want to learn more about AI

Share

Read more

I had big plans for today’s post, I was supposed to finish it before my rest-week. Instead I spent the weekend questioning everything, from my app, the content, whether any of this was working, whether I should just go get a real job.

You know that feeling. You’ve had it too.

Subscribe now

My Clarity

I almost talked myself into stopping. Not quitting forever, just... stopping long enough that it would’ve been hard to start again.

Then I sent one text.

One question to a client I’ve been working with for months. A 40-year business veteran who’s been quietly telling people about me without me even knowing. I asked her if she ever gets clients with technical problems she can’t solve and has to send somewhere else.

She said yes.

Two hours later we had a meeting. By the end of it my action item was to send her a pricing sheet so she can bring me in as her technical partner—she bills the client, I do the work, a big win win.

I didn’t pitch her. I didn’t have a deck. I just asked the right question and let her talk.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

This is what I keep seeing, with myself and everyone I talk to. The answer isn’t hidden. It’s not in a course, a framework, or the next tool. It’s usually one conversation away—sometimes it’s even closer than that.

If you’ve been circling something for weeks and can’t get traction, I bet it might not be a strategy or skill problem. It might just be that you haven’t said it out loud to the right person yet.

In case you missed these from the last two weeks:

How I spent a year giving away the 1 thing I should’ve been known for

Raw conversation on what AI is actually breaking in 2026

What’s the 1 thing you’ve been circling that you haven’t said out loud yet?

Leave a comment

Clarity From Relationships

The most valuable thing I can offer isn’t just my technical knowledge. It’s the clarity that comes from asking the right questions and helping you see what you’ve been too close to notice.

That’s where real progress begins.

It took me an entire year to figure that out.

Subscribe now

What’s up, I’m Clint. Built software. Led teams. Now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every post is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum. If you’re in that space, I’m easy to find

People Take — But You Don’t Get

It’s been a bit over a year since I started on this journey to help people learn AI and build confidence. My goal was aimed directly at builders just getting started or stuck on their dream project.

I have your back, I posted everywhere because I wanted share my wealth of knowledge.

Knowledge that is matched with a good AI prompt search & well, the ton of others that are providing the same.

What separates me?

I can actually do the work and I provide this Substack to provide insights from that work.

The main truth, I’ve learned is that you always have to start with a conversation that provides the one thing that I’ve been giving away this whole time.

How It Began?

It’s October 2024 and I’m switching jobs, contemplating what to do next. A full career in tech from engineer to leader sits behind me and with all the AI noise, do I just get another job, or do I go into consulting?

I chose to get another job first. I hit the job boards applying for several jobs a day. I got really good at it—started to predict what every application would ask for and built my defense against the canned rejection emails.

No way it’s that bad—I thought. I doubled down, applying for more, going to interviews, round upon round, application by application.

But Nothing!

Then I went back to the other question: do I go back into consulting?

With a strong hesitation—due to some bad experiences in consulting years prior—I still chose to moved forward.

I built myself a website, registered my business, took sales and marketing refresher courses, taught myself basic bookkeeping, and set my passion toward the vision—show the kids entrepreneurship is possible.

I found networking events, groups and meetups, all while actively watching how AI impacted software engineering.

I had previously discovered Substack and created a self-reflection publication—to remind me & others about the importance of self-reflection. Once I learned the ins-and-outs of Substack, I created Tech Wing Bites to go along with my business.

At first it was just short articles and posts, using AI, friends and my daughter to help me post—it became a burden, but I double down and owned the task.

I then built consistency in writing content, posting content and always trying to provide value—hoping to help builders that are small business owners, founders and professionals to build AI confidence.

I even wrote an eBook, tried a webinar, and strongly considered podcasting.

Ignoring all fears, I pushed full speed ahead.

This entire time, I was building relationships—or so I thought—through “consulting” for free for people.

I created several frameworks and mental models—Achievement Facilitation Framework—to get me through my challenges and answer questions from those I consulted with.

I thought to myself again, this is a lot of work to run a business—but I got this.

My reflection articles kept me motivated but still I got burnt out several times trying to keep up with routines.

Then only recently—after that entire year—it all hit me.

People don’t want to learn. They want clear outcomes that don’t hurt their pockets.

But before we can even get to that point,

They only wanted that thing I’ve been giving away free:

Clarity.

Then, 3 days ago it hit me—what an awesome reminder:

Everyone wants to believe they’re right because if they agree to be wrong, it would mean they’ve been living a lie and have to relearn everything.

And most won’t up front agree to getting mentored or coached—it’s a trust game—and let’s not talk about consulting, many look down on the idea:

Because, I think I’m interesting 😁 …and deliver clarity in a unique way.

Ok, not everyone is going to vibe with that—it’s about relationships—but if you’re still here—you do. 🤔

Continue reading…

The Realization & Pivot

Throughout the past year, I worked with business owners, engineers, project managers and fellow builders to helped them get clarity on their vision for their stalled, stuck, unfinished projects and ideas.

We created vision maps, roadmaps/timelines, systems and workflows using my Achievement Facilitation Framework. But I didn’t talk about this much because it wasn’t AI Confidence, it was Confidence from Clarity through conversation.

Clarity on what tools to use.
Clarity on how to approach things strategically.
Clarity on pricing—not even mine, just industry standards.
Clarity on why it costs so much.
Clarity on what you should be focused on because you’re spreading yourself too thin.

And for me?

The only clarity I needed the entire time was: What do I actually do every single day?

Provide Clarity.

I needed clarity myself, but was so focus on helping others I never recognized that what my mentoring, coaching and fractional consulting was really about.

It was all masked in:

My clientele & leads would call me and asks: should I, how do I, and when do I?

I would meet up with them and when we were done, they would always leave thanking me for the clarity.

Sometimes I wondered, I just listened...

yeah, of course, I did ask a few direct questions...🤔

but that within itself was the clarity they needed to allow them to zoom in on the actual outcome they wanted to complete their project.

What Lack of Clarity Actually Creates

I noticed from all my conversations that when clients focus so much on outcomes without clarity of their vision, it always brings confusion and disorganization. This naturally leads to burnout, toxicity, burnt bridges, failed relationships, and of course, failed projects.

Real Examples of Clarity in Action

(real stories, fake names)

Take Brad, a very smart technician that ran his oil change startup. He knew exactly how to work in his business but when it came to how tech can help his business that’s where I came in. We sat down and created workflow diagrams to find pitfalls, bottlenecks and finally created objectives to help him grow.

The result:

• I built him a WordPress website and covered general management—even though I gave him the DIY AI option.

• Then he wanted to promote it himself but didn’t know what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was. Nor had he built any social media habits for engagement or tools to support this workflow.

I did the heavy lifting: setup his email, website, sent training docs on how to manage the Content Management Systems (CMS) & AI prompts for help. I provided steps on how to sign up for tools that post once but share on all the social media platforms of his choice. I explained that even though these tools are great, he should focus on one platform where he’s already active and work on replying to comments to promote engagement.

This all felt standard to me, yet it was all new to him and got him the momentum he needed.

Jennifer, an artist, doesn’t like social media, doesn’t like checking email, but feels stalled on how to build and grow her business. She ignores the marketing side mostly because it’s too expensive. After one conversation explaining how to easy it was to use Instagram stories to promote her photos of her art work.

The result:

• She signed up and all the photos she usually sent me to show off her work, she started posting.

• Now people knew about her craft and what she offers.

I know it seems so simple and I don’t believe that Jennifer didn’t know about this, but getting her thoughts organized and questions answered around this simple approach gave her the confidence to start taking action.

These mentoring conversations, to me are just conversations—we’re building relationships. They’re not camps, workshops, weekly sessions yet they’re getting clarity and taking action.

I manage a small team of 6 for a small accounting firm—this is what I would expect from them. I know that I’m providing them clarity in such an environment but clarity for strictly for consulting? Nah…

I didn’t think it would be as impactful due to the “consulting noise”—everyone is a consultant smarter than you that can bring you clarity, right?

Maybe… it sure seem so, and I didn’t want to fall into that category.

Through networking events I met a few people, one I met 2 times, first time we talked about his ideas and goals, I encouraged him to go after them, the 2nd conversation he was thanking me for inspiring him to create his new start up he’s launching in 2026.

Another, an software engineer, hesitated on creating his marketing app to collect feedback for his main app—I just got a text that his app is live.

And 3 others I chatted with is now deep working on their side gigs.

My focus is always to start small and use the thing you’re mostly familiar with. Especially with AI—it’s practically in all apps we use. Zapier—a popular automation tool that allows you to handle integration workflows—is always the go to for small businesses to connect their tools. I think it’s a great tool, but I had to tell several clients to try to focus on tools you already use because this reduces the cognitive load of learning something new.

Tools like Microsoft Power Automate, Notion automation, and I recently saw Google Workspace Studio allows you to create basic automation to help with some of the things you don’t realize you spend a lot of time on—I’ll be diving to that one next; excited to revaluate my automated life.

All with, and built-in AI.

Even with pricing. Tom came to me asking about apps for the app store. Like normal, I started to provide clarity.

There are many types of apps: native apps, web apps, plugins, and this varies in cost. He then became overwhelmed and panicked, almost losing motivation.

Sometimes it’s not about the questions they’re asking—it’s about the structured answer they need.

I asked Tom a few more questions, told him I’d email later, and provided easy-to-understand steps he should go by:

Understanding your scope, build your requirements, and then assess pricing to negotiate or decide if you’ll use AI to build it yourself.

But if you do use AI for building, don’t forget to leave time for the management of your creations—daily, weekly or even monthly. Something I believe tons of vibe coder builders are not including in their workflows.

These are the type of reminders that my kids get daily when they share their creations—to them it’s not clarity, it’s dad pestering them 😂 lol.

The Challenge We All Face

The struggle that I see with most builders that are startup founders, existing small business owners or just a solo builder, is usually financial and visibility.

These two work together. If provided the right visibility to the right people, the hope is that this leads to financial gain.

…and making that pitch to ask for money is another challenge within itself—the sales game.

That is an insight that most miss, once it becomes obvious you’ll have clarity.

What makes this hard, is when you’re getting clarity, it requires you to slow down even if, everything screams at you to move faster.

It requires admitting you don’t have all the answers when you’ve been telling yourself you do.

It requires trusting someone else’s perspective when you’ve been the sole decision-maker.

Without clarity, you risk:

Building the wrong thing for the wrong people or purpose, wasting precious resources on tools and tactics that don’t align with your actual needs, burning out your team (or yourself) chasing undefined goals or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and missing the market window because you’re stuck in analysis paralysis or scattered execution—implementing everything you hear on YouTube or TikTok.

Well, You’re Good To Go!

After a year of giving clarity away free, I finally claimed it for myself, that action alone provided me the opportunity to pivot my focus.

I’m going deeper into hands on building again for myself—bringing all those years of engineering—this will allow me to gain deeper insights for my fractional consulting work.

And who knows I may get a product or two out of it.

And as I learn, I’ll be encouraging you to get clarity first and build with a focus mind until you actually ship.

I’m now focus on working with capable founders and builders to help them get unstuck by Teardown Diagnosis for current ideations, processes, systems, or workflows to provide clarity.

After we get to clarity, then we can decide what’s next.

Hopefully, this article should provided you with some needed clarity.

I’ll continue to help you build confidence in this SubStack—not on AI alone.

But also with clarity from what I’ve learned through common pitfalls; from strategic planning of projects to my personal experiences with building complex systems—especially with AI.

How to get out of stalled or unfinished projects?

How do you get to the next steps?

When to use AI to build vs. AI to plan vs. AI to implement.

If any of these insights resonate with you for your work or project, you’re welcome.

I’ll be providing more checklists, podcast episodes, and tips around Diagnosis and Clarity, of course AI Confidence too. 😁

Let’s continue to grow and get clarity together.

I’d love to hear what is blocking your progress and preventing a clear path forward.

If you’re a builder
—building anything with AI—
& feeling stuck,
Are you ready to get new eyes for on that project for Clarity?

Schedule a 1 hour
Diagnosis Clarity Session

Let’s figure out what’s actually in the way.

Share

Reflection Notes

My documented progress

1. My website: Tech Wing Management
   http://tech-wingman.com/

2. AI Confidence Playbook: eBook

3. My 2025 AI Confidence Webinar

4. My Achievement Facilitation Framework to Mentor Engineers via Vision Maps and Small Business Owners
   https://tech-wingman.com/services/

5. Fire Talk 🔥Podcast
   https://techwingman.substack.com/podcast

Time to go beyond AI just for writing emails or making silly pictures, and really see how to get clarity for your stuck & incomplete projects.

In this episode, I pulled a few partners on the journey of using AI to build as a founder and leverage with simple tools, watching trends topics & providing insights.

Fire Talk🔥 Raw, unfiltered conversations about what AI is actually breaking while everyone races to win, we talk ethics when others only pitch solutions, expose the mess behind ‘moving fast,’ and show you the power you’re ignoring in tools you already own.

Recorded November 18th 2025

Vibe Coding adoption in 2026—where people build apps with just their voice—why the big internet infrastructure like Cloudflare is fragile, and why the most powerful AI isn’t the one you’re paying $20 for.

The New Way to Build, The Money & The Future

• The Internet’s “Check Engine” Light: A look at the 2025 Cloudflare outages and why depending on one big company is becoming a major risk for your business—that also include AWS and it’s competitors.

• Vibe Coding & Base44: We share real experiences using “vibe coding and the technical “hiccups” that still get in the way.

• Dumb Models vs. Local Power: Why public AI models (like ChatGPT or Gemini) feel like they’re getting “dumber” and why we are switching to running massive 400GB models privately on our own hardware.

• The $350 Billion AI War: Why Anthropic’s massive valuation is shaking up the stock market, tech investments and AI platforms.

• Project Prometheus: Jeff Bezos’ new secret project that aims to use AI for heavy-duty manufacturing and space travel.

• The Death of the Web Browser: Why searching the web is being replaced by “agents” that do the research and shopping for you while you sleep.

• Quantum Energy Issues: The scary truth about Quantum computers—they are incredibly fast, but they might require more energy than the planet can safely provide.

What’s up, welcome to Fire Talks by Tech Wing Bites. I’m Clint — built software, led teams, now a founder helping builders who are ready to make the leap but can’t quite see the path yet. Every episode is one conversation closer to clarity on ownership, execution and momentum.

Fire Talk 🔥 Guests

| Engineer @ RipeMango.AI
Creativity is my playground, imagination is my limit.

---

ReCharge & Refocus, Unleash your Ultimate Productivity

DocuSign Lead Consultant @ Google. Building ripemango.ai for AI-driven business automation. Sharing productivity insights at clifnotesweekendedition.com, productivityme.app

Where they are most active:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/clifmaloney/)
ripemango.io, ripemango.ai, clifnotesweekendedition.com, productivityme.app

Egan Jones | AI Consultant, CEO, Value Creator @ SuperFluidic.AI
Frictionless Workflows.

---

I will help you Get More Done AND Go Home Early

Seeing the Future, Deep and Wide Problem-Solving Skillset

Where they are most active: Occasionally on LinkedIn, superfluidic.ai

If this episode helped cut through the noise for you.

Share it with 1 person who Needs Clarity on the 2026 Tech Reset

Share

Read more

Watch The Easy Video Creation!

This week I tried Higgsfield & created that video below—go ahead, watch it! Making the video with AI couldn’t of been easier, even if the websites is a bit intimidating.

I’ll also be taking a full week break, next week for some reflection. Come on, we should always take breaks, it’s great for your reflection too.

Subscribe now

I create & plan out my own work and it still piles up. Priority becomes the sole focus as I have soo many things I want to do.

So back to my crazy office, with 6 monitors in the cockpit and I’m the crazy driver, with multiple browser tabs open—wondering, why do I have that one tab I never use open for weeks.

Everyday I push myself to learn something new—not just with AI but also self. It’s so hard to stay focus on one thing while the world is going nuts. I just can’t understand with all this technology, we still fear each other.

We have information at our finger tips—AI research can show you that historically we as humans are fearful resulting in backlash and stagnation.

The way it went was, 1 person claimed to have all the answers, so we follow them, cause we didn’t know any better.

But now, the answers is in front of us we just have to listen, think then act.

No Unintended Distractions

I hold myself accountable to stay focus on AI Confidence, learning how to implement it to improve the work professionals do, and since I know I can’t do it all by myself, I’ve started a group with founders, engineers and professionals who is as curious about AI like I am.

I call it Fire Talks🔥

…and I’ll soon be releasing the discussions hoping you can find some value and insights.

It’s an unstructured conversation around technology and AI.

Some of the topics we’ve covered:

• How is AI affecting our lives?

• Understand MCP servers

• AI and preparing to apply for grants

• AI trends and AI chips

• Ethical AI and why we should pay attention

Let’s Go—Full Speed Ahead

You dread what you believe is hard, complicated & challenging. That allows fear to build, but once you get much needed clarity, the cognitive ease allows you to move mountains—that’s how we should be.

Stop being afraid, stop procrastinating and do that thing that you want to do—with or without AI!

My motivation for posting AI Confidence tips and insights is to hopefully get you going—to keep you in the game.

Here’s a few Substack notes I posted and some that catch my eye:

Stop Being Scared!

The hardest part for me is having to put myself out there. I cringe every time I see myself on video—even in photos.

As they say, you have to rip the bandaid off.

This is how you build any kind of confidence.

So you’re on this journey with me 😁

How To Support Me

After my last reflection, I was asked how to support?

You are supporting me, you’re reading this, you made it this far…Thank You

Of course, being a subscriber helps, I’m very thankful—even if you’re just free.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Are you getting value from my publication?

• Are you putting those to tips, tricks and insights into actions?

• Am I providing ideas to get you going?

Then definitely stay here.

I will continue to try my best to provide value.

All I need from you is feedback.

Additionally, here are other ways to support my efforts to allow me to keep going and continue to build AI confidence together in 2026

Support Tech-Wing