Telling Technology · Learning in public
Builds in public

Real constraints removed.
Real KPIs moved.

The systems behind the channel itself. Each build follows one framework: the thinking constraint that was blocking progress, the KPI that measures the improvement, and the AI system that solved it. Client & enterprise work lives on the Cases page.

Thinking constraint
KPI (before → after)
Build
Case 01 Publishing

Episode pages were a manual 2–4 h job blocking every publish

Thinking constraint

Building each episode page took 2–4 hours of focused writing + assembly. I couldn't publish without being present and uninterrupted.

KPI
0 h

Jacob-time per episode build. AI reads the brief and builds the page unsupervised overnight.

Build

Nightly engine: claude -p runs on a Task Scheduler cron. It reads a brief I drop at 20:30, asks clarifying questions via Telegram, then builds the full episode HTML and leaves a morning handoff note.

claude -p cron Telegram nightly briefs
Case 02 Research

Evaluating a tutorial video took 20 minutes of passive watching

Thinking constraint

Before I could use a video’s claims in content I had to sit through the whole thing — a gating step on every piece of research.

KPI
20 min → 3 min

Extract + full fact-check. Found income claims were 4× inflated vs. real market rates.

Build

The /watch skill: yt-dlp downloads, ffmpeg extracts 80 frames, Whisper transcribes 565 segments, then three parallel research agents cross-verify the claims against external sources.

/watch skill yt-dlp ffmpeg Whisper parallel agents
Case 03 Infrastructure

AI agents couldn’t read the site — every site-aware automation was blocked

Thinking constraint

The site was built for human eyes. Agents scraped it badly and missed key content, blocking any workflow that needed site context.

KPI
1 command

npx tellingtechnology — any AI reads the entire site from a single call, in full context.

Build

llms.txt manifest, JSON site index, an npm CLI package, and an MCP server — so any Claude instance can query the full site content without touching the HTML.

llms.txt JSON index MCP server npm CLI
Case 04 Observability

Context filling was invisible — sessions died with no warning

Thinking constraint

Long sessions degraded silently as context filled. I only noticed when output quality dropped — too late to act cleanly.

KPI
0

Silent context deaths. Two live token bars in the terminal show exactly when to /compact before quality drops.

Build

statusline.js — a Node script that polls Claude Code’s internal session state and renders a real-time cockpit bar: model, effort level, context fuel, and session-token fuel.

statusline.js Node Claude Code hooks
Case 05 In-house consulting

The team’s AI-fixable problems had no owner — they kept piling up

Thinking constraint

Colleagues hit repetitive bottlenecks they didn’t know AI could remove. No one on the team could diagnose the problem, let alone prescribe a fix.

KPI
Inbound ↑

Colleagues now bring problems to me. Went from nobody knowing who to ask → the team’s default first call for anything AI-shaped.

Build

No single artifact — the pattern. Applied constraint-first thinking inside one complex product company: audited real blockers, shipped targeted fixes, measured before/after. Results visible to the team compounded into trust.

constraint audit internal consulting in-house AI role
“I’m not going to find this job on LinkedIn — because it doesn’t exist yet.”

Need a constraint removed in your company?

I scope one constraint at a time, build the AI system to remove it, and measure the before/after.

Work with me →