Nektar Insights
Insights
Thinking on AI, data, and building things that work.
What 1,449 Utah Vanity Plates Look Like When You Let Sonnet Read Them
I gave Claude Sonnet 1,449 photos of vanity plates from my camera roll. One batch pass — OCR, interpretation, category, vehicle, state — total cost $4.50. The interactive census, the methodology, and what the model got right and wrong.
Read →I Was Treating Claude Like a One-Person Shop. So I Ran an A/B Test.
My Claude bill kept climbing while Codex and Ollama sat unused. I asked the obvious question — does delegating actually save anything? Here is what the numbers said.
Read →Rebuilding my Utah Hockey Club submission, 21 months later
Public post-mortem of my 2024 submission to the Utah Hockey Club Summer Analytics Challenge. Seven specific failures, a rebuilt methodology, and what 21 months of unseen data did to the numbers.
Read →Vibe Coding Has a Pilot Problem
AI is the most capable co-pilot ever built. But a co-pilot without a pilot just crashes faster. Three modes of working with AI that actually produce results.
Read →My AI Suggested a Technique from Cancer Research. It Was Exactly Right.
Averages hide the story. Kaplan-Meier survival curves show you when loans default — not just if. How a technique from oncology transforms portfolio analytics.
Read →Drives Beat Drops at Every Level. 304K Shots Prove It.
I analyzed 304,000 pickleball shots and built an interactive dashboard in an afternoon. Here's what the data says — and what it proves about building with AI.
Read →I Almost Destroyed My Production Server Because the AI Said It Was Safe
The monitoring showed CPU at zero. The AI said it was a ghost server. It was running five production apps. Here's what vibe coding gets wrong about infrastructure.
Read →How 84 Secret Versions Cost Me More Than My Entire Cloud Run App
I set a $5/month GCP budget alert. When it finally fired, Secret Manager was 55% of the bill. Here's how I fixed it in 30 minutes.
Read →Vibe Coding Has a Security Problem
Vibe coding compresses the time developers accumulate third-party trust and secrets. A look at what that means after the Vercel April 2026 incident.
Read →Nektar Rival Alerts: MVP PRD
A timing-and-emotion product for instant rival-loss alerts, one-tap roast generation, and private sharing.
Read →By the Numbers: 78 Days of AI Engineering
Activity heatmaps, token-volume charts, model mix, and ROI breakdowns — the interactive data companion to 78 days of building with AI.
Read →The Practice: What 78 Days of AI Engineering Actually Taught Me
How daily AI sessions compound into production software — the ratio, the feedback loop, the difference between vibe coding and engineering discipline.
Read →FYBY: For You, By You
The FUBU of software. Why the person closest to the problem is now the person building the solution.
Read →Smoke Tests & Harnesses in Vibe Coding
The testing discipline that keeps AI-generated code from blowing up in production.
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