Will's Journal.
Websites Most Small Business Sites Need Fewer Pages — and Clearer Jobs
Most small business websites need fewer pages than agencies sell — usually 5 to 9 URLs — each with one job a visitor can finish cleanly. Start with jobs.
AI Agents When Not to Build an Agent (And What to Build Instead)
Agents are for uncertain paths with clear criteria. If the path is known, build automation. If criteria are mush, fix the process. Here is how to choose without theater.
AI Agents Durable Agent Runtimes: Survive Restarts Without Calling It "Memory"
Durability is resume-correct state across crashes and human waits—not memory. Choose LangGraph, Durable Objects, or Temporal by the failure you must survive.
Automation When Automation Fails at 2am: Alerts, Severity, and Who Gets Woken
At 2am the wrong answer is silence: page money and customer paths, morning-triage the rest, and detect never-ran failures with heartbeats before dawn.
AI Visibility AI Citations Have Three Clocks — Hours, Weeks, and Quarters
AI citations run on three clocks: live retrieval in hours to days, crawl and index lag in weeks, and model-memory residue in quarters. Plan all three.
Websites Pricing Pages for Studios: Clarity Without Racing to the Bottom
How studios should present website package pricing: clear scope boundaries, self-qualification, and paths for custom work — without a discount war.
Websites A Custom Site Is Worth It When the Template Cap Is Costing You Deals
Custom is worth it when templates cap conversion, differentiation, or ownership — not because custom is fashionable. Here’s the stage-based threshold test.
AI Agents Pre-Execution Policy Gates: The Kill Switch That Lives Outside the Prompt
Your agent’s kill switch is a pre-execution policy gate outside the prompt: allow, deny, or pending-approval before side effects — fail closed on outages.
Automation How Long a Production Automation Takes (Happy Path Is Not the Clock)
A demo can ship in a day; production automation takes weeks because spine, staging, approvals, and ownership are the real clock — not mere node count.
AI Visibility When AEO Is Worth the Budget — and When to Wait
AEO is worth it when buyers ask AI before they click — and you can staff a prompt panel. Skip fake conversion multipliers; judge ROI on citations and pipeline.
Websites If You Can’t Leave Cleanly, You Don’t Own the Site
If domain, hosting, code, CMS, DNS, and analytics aren’t in your accounts, you don’t own the site — you only rent access until your designer disappears.
AI Agents LLM-as-Judge Reliability: Calibrate the Scorer Before You Trust the Score
An LLM judge is a noisy instrument, not ground truth. Calibrate against human labels, kill position and verbosity bias, re-check after model or rubric changes.