Notes from running a fintech with AI — plus the occasional piece on investing and leadership.
Going deeper? Technical build logs live in The Lab →Colors, type, spacing and a logo I finally stopped fiddling with, all in Figma, all turned into code, and live on the site the same night. Plus the font I had to give up.
The AI-generated emblem was the brief, not the file. Rebuilding it properly taught me more about brand work than the generating did — and the first thing it went on was a golf sign.
Three real relationships and no revenue isn't a pipeline. I built the system of record anyway — Attio, fed by Granola and Claude — because the first time you need a CRM is exactly when it's too late to set one up.
Anthropic says Opus 5.5 performs at roughly Fable's level on most work, at 40% lower cost. I spent day one throwing my messiest current project at it. Here's what changed and what didn't.
No QuickBooks, no bookkeeper, no numbered chart of accounts. A spreadsheet built around Schedule C, a receipts folder that sorts itself, and Claude reconciling against the bank feed.
Opening the LLC's account took twenty minutes. The surprise was realizing how convoluted my personal money movement had become — and that the fix was the same tool.
The obvious move was to turn brettchereskin.com into the consulting site. I did the opposite — and set up the business domain, email, and files so the LLC can stand on its own.
Clarent Consulting LLC exists. New York over Delaware, an Albany address to dodge the Manhattan publication bill, and what Northwest Registered Agent was — and wasn't — worth.
Fable got pulled three days after launch and came back July 1. I'm using it for the boring part nobody blogs about — the research you do before you form a company.
The Army taught me to give intent, not step-by-step orders, and trust the people closest to the problem. It turns out that is also the secret to getting great work out of AI.
People are asking AI instead of Googling. That quietly rewrites the rules of being found. Here's how I evaluated Profound versus Athena for work — and why we went with Athena.
A routine visit to a specialist turned into a billing mess and a denied claim. Most people give up at that point. AI is the reason I didn't — and why I filed a formal complaint with the state.
I ran the major AI meeting-notes tools through real work — including a head-to-head with the Gemini note-taker built into Google Meet. One quietly won. Here is why Granola earned the spot.
Claude Opus 4.8 is a real step up and my everyday workhorse. But the first time I handed a sprawling, multi-step problem to Fable — a long-horizon model — I saw where this is actually going.
My tax preparers couldn't get me my numbers in time, so I uploaded everything to Claude and estimated my own taxes. When the pros finished, they were super close — and the planning paid off all year.
I built the first version of this site with Claude in February. Three months later I rebuilt it — same tool, new design capabilities, totally different result. A walk-through of what Opus 4.7 and the Claude Code desktop app actually changed, with before/after screenshots.
I have a CPA, a financial advisor, and a doctor. I am not replacing any of them. But the way I interact with all of them has fundamentally changed this year — and AI is the reason.
I built a personalized Claude quick-start guide for a friend, hosted it on my website, and then turned the whole thing into a database-backed content platform with admin controls — all in a single session. The speed of iteration is getting absurd.
I shipped five features in a week using AI. Then I asked it to audit what I built — and it found a hole I never would have caught on my own. The technical gap is closing. What is opening in its place matters more.
A contact form that logs leads to a database. A comment section for readers. A private admin dashboard. All built without writing code — and what it reveals about the new economics of building.
A non-technical operator goes from blank screen to live custom website in one afternoon — and discovers that the bottleneck was never technical skill. It was something else entirely.
The executives pulling ahead are not waiting for IT to roll out an approved solution. They are running their own experiments — and building a cognitive advantage that compounds every single week.