Ether distribution · fresh from the lab
Rich's periodic notes from the software shipping loop.
Weekly lab notes from an engineer who directs AI systems for a living — what actually ships, what breaks, and the receipts.
01 · The notes
All the lab notes at a glance
Each note is a week of real work: what I ran, what it cost, what I'd do differently. Tear one off and read it.
Life-saving staging skills
If there was one thing that changed my (dev) life for the better...
Open the notes AIN · 036Coding by hand
A friend's Enterprise Claude Code license came with a $100 API budget. It ran out at step 7 of 9, so he finished the feature with his hands.
Open the notes AIN · 035Hand off communication, cut context switching
Four agent skills handle Slack drafts, review comments, QA handoffs, and post-deploy follow-up so I can stay focused on the work.
Open the notes AIN · 034Challenge your tools & Rails.Builders new edition
The Rails.Builders go into a new Continuous r-AI-ls.Builders round with limited seats and challenging your tools as a time saver.
Open the notes AIN · 031-033302 the new richsteinmetz space redirect
Moving with the tech.
Open the notes AIN · 030Conductor refused to diff that token spree
This is a real PR shipping real value, hopefully next week: And I'm confused why I'm running out of tokens. 😅 So far, I've been trying to max out on best models and thinking levels. This week I ran out of Claude tokens on…
Open the notes AIN · 029How to review PRs in the year of agents?
If you ship it at an AI-first company, or hell, even as a solo producer, everyone's ideas should be flowing into code like melting butter, and that code needs to be verified somehow. If the shipping speed is right, there will be…
Open the notes AIN · 028Aphetamine + iPhone Hotspot
I like amphetamine. Somehow, more often than not, I start spinning out worktrees and AI tasks right before I have to go. Unlike the happy home office folks, my work life happens 90% at co-working spaces. So, as my teenage sister…
Open the notes AIN · 027Managing token use
Running out of your subscription limit tokens is a real issue that I have been dealing with more frequently lately, so let's chat about current strategies. 🫵If you aren't ever running out of your subscription tokens, you are…
Open the notes AICN · 026To grill-me or not to grill-me
At the last ClickFunnels hackathon, I gave a spontaneous talk on skills and local engineering setup, and asked the team to roast me on my setup. One roasting comment was whether one of my new favorite skills is really that…
Open the notes AICN · 025Control your local Claude skills
If you rely on global Claude skills on your local machine, you need to make sure that they don't irreversibly change in behavior. If your LLM creates and maintains your skills, there is a chance this will happen. One useful thing…
Open the notes WEEK · 024MCP content nuggets
Not many links this week. I usually watch and read content during lunch or in the evenings, but this week we were heads down hacking at the ClickFunnels Atlanta office. The day before the hackathon, I dug some MCP server content.…
Open the notes WEEK · 023Best practical AI Engineering content & new book hobbies
Wazzup, party people!? (you know it's Rich-generated if a post starts like this, right?) 👋You are getting this because you were previously subscribed to RichStoneIO, or you opted in for a Rails.Builders cohort. You know what to…
Open the notes02 · Stay on the loop
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