Documenting the practical side of building with artificial intelligence. What works, what doesn't, and what I'm learning along the way.
Live AI infrastructure stock portfolio — 10 positions, real-time quotes, sell triggers, and earnings calendar.
Curated experiments, findings, and technical explorations from real AI projects.
Reusable prompts, workflows, and starter kits built from actual projects.
Needed a cinematic landscape image for a website. SVG and CSS couldn't cut it. Found fal.ai — basically OpenRouter but for image models. Ran the same prompt across three models simultaneously: nano-banana-2, grok-imagine, and gpt-image-1.5. Total cost: free. Result in minutes, dramatically better than anything code could generate.
Built a live stock portfolio dashboard from scratch — 10 positions, real-time Finnhub quotes, smart market-hours refresh logic that freezes prices after close. Zero prior front-end design experience. Wired a free API key directly into the browser behind Cloudflare SSO instead of routing through an Azure Function. Simplest architecture wins.
Deployed a full Azure Static Web Apps stack with Cloudflare Zero Trust SSO in a single session. Google OAuth, custom domain, GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline, DNSSEC. Azure Easy Auth was a dead end — it always routes through Microsoft AAD regardless of provider. Cloudflare Access at the edge is the right answer.
v0.dev is the right tool for UI layout and component generation — it has real design sensibility. But it outputs Next.js/TypeScript by default, which is overkill for a static site. Always ask it to convert to a single self-contained HTML file before pulling the code. Saves an hour of untangling build pipelines.
Azure Function App creation failed on a free trial subscription — both Consumption and Flex Consumption plans are quota-blocked. The fix isn't to fight it, it's to rethink the architecture. Calling Finnhub directly from the browser behind SSO is simpler, faster, and free. The Function App was solving a problem the SSO already solved.
Claude is better at wiring and logic than visual design. SVG landscape art, CSS gradient mountains, polygon trees — it tries hard but the output doesn't match what a real design tool produces. Know the tool's limits: use AI for architecture, APIs, and code. Use purpose-built image models for anything that needs to look good.