Dan Hopwood

Archives

All the articles I've archived.

2026 12
June 4

  • Rebuilding fidero.com with an AI agent – the reference-doc-driven workflow
    6 min read

    It took four builds of the same site to get here. The fourth runs on a reference doc the agent builds from – a contract for every component that gets each new page about 95% right in a single pass.

  • The order you build a software factory in
    6 min read

    Six investments turn agents into a software factory. The order you make them in decides whether you get 10x the output or 10x the waste.

  • Writing loops is a ladder, not a command
    6 min read

    Boris Cherny says his job now is writing loops, not prompts. There's a Claude Code command literally called /loop – and assuming that's what he means is the mistake. It's the bottom rung of a much taller ladder.

  • I run my AI's customer notes like a database
    7 min read

    The framework that keeps my AI's knowledge of each customer trustworthy is just data governance under another name – source-of-truth rules, validation constraints, retention limits, schemas that grow on demand.

May 2

  • Maturity, not complexity
    7 min read

    Someone else's AI setup looks impossible because it's had longer to grow, not because it's a harder idea than yours.

  • The recording was the easy bit
    5 min read

    The fix for graveyard call transcripts isn't a better recorder. It's a pipeline that turns each transcript into agent-ready context the moment it lands.

April 4

  • I replaced Granola in 2 hours
    5 min read

    Granola labels every guest "Them" – useless on 3+ person calls. So I built a replacement in 2 hours.

  • Forgetting isn't the problem
    5 min read

    Bigger context windows fix the wrong half of the AI codebase problem. The half they don't fix gets worse as your codebase grows.

  • The memory bank framework
    6 min read

    Six files, a session loop and a 30-second ritual. The structured memory system I install on every new project.

  • I used Claude Code to read its own source code
    6 min read

    Its source code leaked. So I used it to explore itself – 8 parallel agents, 1,884 TypeScript files and a hidden digital pet.

March 2