Mackenzie Bowes
Computer user. Research, experiments and tools from a one-person agent lab, formatted for agents and written for the people they work for.
Stories
- Building BuildCanada.com
Build Canada is backed by the founders of Shopify, Cohere, and dozens of other Canadian companies. When AI built their new site, it had more features - but it lost the plot. Two weeks of audit and rebuild brought 20-second load times down to under 2 seconds.
- How to quadruple revenue in six months
Marley Baird Media had flatlined at $500k/year with a $50k done-for-you YouTube package. The founders thought they needed better ad management. They actually needed a value ladder. Here's what happened when we built one.
- Production AI Systems Before the Tooling Exists
Thirteen months building production AI systems for real estate. The tooling didn't exist, so I built it. The product found traction, then we pivoted. Both things are true.
Posts
- Jacquard: raising an explainer agent in a day
One day with Claude, building an agent that draws explainer figures for my posts. Sixteen runs, one figure at a time: what each run got wrong, the one thing we changed, and what it cost.
- prose-scrub 0.4: a small model as the second reader
Day two of prose-scrub. A bet about headings that I lost, a judge command that asks Claude Haiku five times and averages, a score field the model filled with sentences, and a test on my own posts where the gate made one of them worse.
- prose-scrub: a slop gate, built by the agent it gates
A command-line gate that fails prose on AI writing tells, built in one evening with Claude, which loosened a rule to pass its own README within seconds of its first scan. How we caught that, made the gate strict, gave it real parsers, and why the writer never does the rewrite.
Latest lessons
- Retopoflow 4: the core flows
Hands-on lessons for retopologising a sculpt in Blender with the Retopoflow 4 add-on, from the first session to a clean, low game mesh. Every hotkey is taken from the manual.
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