Home
Blog

Blog

13 posts

I write here about building and running software on my own, mostly about the decisions that turned out to matter more than they looked at the time.

Lately that has meant a lot of AI workflow: how I actually use Claude Code and Cowork, where my AI budget goes once I sat down and measured it, and how I stopped building our RV routes by hand. On the building side, why I am migrating Knowledge ERP from my own framework to Laravel and Filament, and why I built my own website platform in the first place.

Running a Claude Code agent team on one Mac Mini

Nathan Pelton
Published on Oct 12, 2026

Why my Claude Code agent team runs its checks on my own computer instead of GitHub Actions, how one Mac Mini queues the tests, and Mac Minis vs EC2.

Four Claude Max plans, a Team detour, and an AI that moves my team between accounts

Nathan Pelton
Published on Oct 9, 2026

Four Max 20x accounts, a week on Claude Team, and the HR agent that tells my Claude Code sessions when we've switched accounts.

My Claude Code agent team needed an HR department

Nathan Pelton
Published on Oct 6, 2026

A director, senior developers on Opus, juniors on Sonnet, and a marketing agent full of programmer rules. Why my Claude Code agent team needed HR.

Three Claude accounts, one Mac, and the one thing I couldn't fix

Nathan Pelton
Published on Sep 14, 2026

Claude Code authenticates one account per machine and the desktop app holds one login at a time. Both key their credentials to a directory, which turns out to be the whole trick. Here is the setup for a separate account per client, the traps, and the part that is genuinely impossible.

My agent loop was 62% of a day's tokens. I blamed the code reviews.

Nathan Pelton
Published on Sep 5, 2026

An automated agent loop ran 30 iterations inside one conversation and used 62% of a day's tokens. The code reviews I was suspicious of were half a percent. Here is the mechanism, and what actually fixes it.

540 of my 559 backlinks are spam, and I never bought one

Nathan Pelton
Published on Sep 1, 2026

I have never bought a backlink, and 540 of the 559 referring domains pointing at one of my sites are spam. What the blast looks like up close, why it probably is not hurting me, and how to write a disavow file without shooting yourself in the foot.

I stopped building our RV routes by hand

Nathan Pelton
Published on Aug 7, 2026

Planning one RV travel day used to cost me about two hours in Google Maps. Handing the whole constraint problem to Claude Cowork turned that into a few minutes, and the routes are better than the ones I was building.

I measured where my AI budget actually goes

Nathan Pelton
Published on Jul 31, 2026

I had a confident theory about which projects were expensive. I was wrong four separate ways, and the thing I was rationing turned out to be one percent of the total.

The six-book series I've never read

Nathan Pelton
Published on Jul 31, 2026

I used Claude Cowork to write a six-book LitRPG series and render it as a cast audiobook. Four hours of finished audio cost $22.09.

How I actually use Claude Code and Cowork

Nathan Pelton
Published on Jul 14, 2026

Where AI agents actually fit in my work: content pipelines, batch jobs, and API testing, plus the parts I still do myself.

Start with the process, not the feature list

Nathan Pelton
Published on Jul 14, 2026

The best software projects start with a process that takes too long, not a feature list. How I scope business software, with real examples.

Why I'm migrating Knowledge ERP from my own framework to Laravel and Filament

Nathan Pelton
Published on Jul 14, 2026

Why a solo developer with a working custom PHP framework is moving Knowledge ERP to Laravel and Filament, and what the migration looks like half a year in.

Why I built my own website platform

Nathan Pelton
Published on Jul 14, 2026

Small business websites are a few pages and a blog. Here's why I built Swiftrics to serve them as static files, and what running my own sites on it taught me.