Code & Canvas Journal
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Practical insights on web, SEO, AI, and language - written for founders and solopreneurs building something real. No fluff, no filler. Just things that are actually useful.
We went all in early, back in the o3 days. We built custom GPTs for house style: tone, formatting, structure, all spelled out in JSON so there'd be no ambiguity. The plan was simple. Give people a tool that writes and designs in the agency's voice, and adoption follows.
Your carefully crafted prompts stopped working. The output that took 10 iterations to work well last quarter now returns garbage on the first try. What changed?
Every client I work with has the same screen: six tabs open, six roles being performed by one person. Email, project management, invoicing, social scheduling, analytics, client notes. Each tab is a hat they're wearing. The problem isn't the number of tabs. It's that they're still wearing all the hats.
In March, one of my client's top-performing pages dropped 38% in traffic overnight. The content hadn't changed. The rankings hadn't changed. But Google's AI Overviews had started appearing for that query.
You just had a great discovery call. The prospect asked buying questions, the use case is a perfect match, and you sent the follow-up email with a link to your site. Then, silence. You didn't lose them on the call; you lost them during the credibility check. When enterprise clients or investors look you up, they aren't just evaluating your software. They are looking for signals that your company will still exist in twelve months. If your digital presence looks like a weekend DIY project, you are failing that check.
I deleted my OpenAI account last week. Not because I'm afraid of AI. I deleted it because the company's choices have real consequences for the clients I work with, and I can no longer pretend otherwise.
Last month, a client asked me: “Should I rebuild my website in React, or is there something better in 2026?” They’d read a few blog posts, talked to a developer, and now they were more confused than when they started. They don’t want to learn to code; they just want a website that works, loads fast, and doesn’t cost a fortune to maintain.
