Guides I've written for founders and people building software. Most are a PDF you can read in one sitting, some are web pages, and every one is free.
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Newest first. Click a row for the full entry, read any guide right here on the web, or grab the PDF to keep.
Start with the name brand’s free tier. If your usage fits under it, use the paid tool and skip self-hosting, because your time costs more than a free plan. Open source wins on day one in only two situations, and this guide names both, tool by tool, with the usage or the bill that should trigger a switch.
Categories where I’d skip the name brand entirely and start on the alternative.
The monthly VPS bill behind every “free” self-hosted tool. It’s never the expensive part.
Typeform responses per month on the free plan. That’s the shape of a free tier that can’t run a business.
“Don't screw around with the database. Just use Supabase. If you can't afford Supabase's free tier, something has gone wrong.”From Entry 02 · Backend, Database & Auth
Jev doesn’t write for you. You hand it context and a set of options, and it hands back a classification, a score, or a probability. That’s a narrower product than a chatbot, and the narrowness is the entire opportunity. Eleven places I’d look, and four questions that generate more of them than any list.
Sampled review becomes complete review. That change, not the model, is what customers buy.
A probability instead of a verdict. Thresholds are how software acts on uncertainty without a human in every loop.
Jev-Ultrafast’s second act: decisions that become clicks, on the thousands of sites that never shipped an API.
“If the expensive part of your product is producing the word yes, you don’t have a language problem. You have a pricing problem, and pricing problems are the ones that turn into companies.”From The Guide
/brag is an open-source Claude Code skill that reads your project’s actual code, writes a storyboard, scores it, renders an MP4, and hands you the caption to post with it. Two commands to install, one word to run. Here’s the setup, then five things worth knowing before your first run.
Tone presets, from polished to chaotic, plus freeform direction that overrides any of them.
Files you get back: the plan, the composition, brag.mp4, and share copy written in the video’s tone.
Screenshots, URLs or design assets you need to supply. It reads the source.
“Argue with the plan, not with the render. Fixing a hook in the plan costs a sentence; fixing it after the render costs the render.”From Step Three · Getting A Good One
/brag isn't mine. I have no relationship with the people who make it or with Hyperframes. I just use it.
The 11 most-starred skill repos for Claude Code and Codex, ranked by GitHub stars. For each one you get what it does, what makes it good, and the exact command to install it. This one's a web page, not a PDF, so the Copy buttons work.
Stars on No.01, Matt Pocock's skills.
What every one of them costs.
Ways to install almost anything on the list.
How to build a command-line tool that reads the systems your business actually runs on, with the worked example I built against HubSpot, QuickBooks and Gmail, the seven prompts that produce it, and the part everyone gets stuck on: getting the tokens.
Runtime dependencies. Everything else is the standard library.
Servers, databases, containers, or things that can be down at 8am.
Word you have to remember to use it.
“A tiny surface over messy systems is worth more than a big one. One word plus a company name beats a dashboard with forty filters.”From The Guide
Ten things to check before you upgrade, in the order I’d check them. Most people running out of tokens are not doing too much work. They are carrying too much furniture into every single message.
Input-price gap between Haiku 4.5 and Opus 5. Same dollar, five times the volume.
How often your skills, instructions and tool list get resent. Not once. Every turn.
The one-time audit in Part two. It’s the highest-return half hour here.
“A fresh session that opens at 40,000 tokens isn’t a fresh session. It’s a bill you agreed to before you started working.”From The Guide
Copy these three prompts into muse.ai once your Instagram account is connected. One reads your competitors, one audits your last twenty posts, one takes apart how your videos end. Paste them as-is.
“Every claim needs a post and a number attached to it. That single rule is what separates a useful audit from a horoscope.”From The Guide
Twelve things to check the night before your first App Store submission. Three of them are mine, learned by arguing with Apple. The other nine are the ones that catch everybody else.
Of submissions reviewed within 24 hours, per Apple. Rejections are cheap in money, expensive in days.
The guideline number for account deletion. Memorise it; it’s the one that got me.
The device they’ll test on that you almost certainly haven’t.
“The reviewer isn’t hostile and isn’t on your team. They’re a stranger with a queue, and everything ambiguous resolves against you.”From The Guide
Cloudflare built a toll booth for AI crawlers and left the pricing logic empty on purpose. Eleven businesses that could grow in that gap, what each one actually requires to work, and the specific reason each one might not.
of global web traffic sits behind the company running the toll booth
worst reported crawl-to-referral ratio for a major AI bot
businesses here, each with the reason it might not work
“The interesting part isn’t that a toll booth exists. It’s that nobody has decided what anything costs.”From The Guide
OpenAI shipped a model that can operate software for forty minutes at a stretch and still fails most of the way through six out of ten professional automations. Seven businesses that work anyway, because in each one checking the answer costs less than producing it. Each also gets the specific reason it might not.
gap between the headline ARC-AGI-3 score and the independent harness’s
the direction frontier token prices moved this month. Up.
businesses here, each with the reason it might not work
“Every company has work worth doing that nobody does, because sending a human to go and get it costs more than the work returns.”From The Guide
One block of text you paste above any real request. It forces the model to interview you first, show you its plan, and wait for approval before it writes a word.
questions, delivered at once, ranked by consequence
places it has to stop and wait for you
minutes of answering that saves an hour of rewriting
“A model never says “I don’t know enough to start yet.” It just starts.”From The Guide
How to move a career you already have into the job companies are creating right now: getting real people to actually use the AI they already bought. What the work is, which door you walk in, and the thirty days that make you credible.
case studies that outweigh any certificate
credential actually worth paying for
days to a portfolio, a rewritten profile, and a real story
“The hard part was never the software. It’s the ninety people who have to change how they work.”From The Guide
Ten free courses, in the order that actually works, plus what to build after each one. Four weekends, about twenty five hours, and one small agent at the end that does a real piece of your job.
parts every working agent has
weekends, if you want a schedule
to start. Free tiers cover all of it.
“The hard part was never the code. It is deciding what the agent is allowed to do.”From The Guide
Ninety days, no computer science degree, and a portfolio you can build on your own time. A practical route into the job companies are quietly desperate for and have mostly forgotten to hire.
more likely to report ROI with full visibility into AI operating costs
have delayed or scaled back agent rollouts on cost
have “very clear” rules for when a human overrides AI
“An AI agent manager is not the person who builds the agent. It is the person who makes the agent trustworthy enough to run inside a real business.”From The Guide
Ten ways to put two AI models on the same problem so the second one catches what the first one missed. Why each works, and the one rule that decides whether you get better answers or just more expensive ones.
distinct reasons a second pass helps at all
rule that decides whether any of them work
extra subscriptions required. A second window counts.
“The second model isn’t there to be smarter. It’s there to be uncommitted.”From The Guide
How to make sure the AI-assisted work leaving your hands is real work. And what to do, without starting a fight, when someone hands you the other kind.
average time lost dealing with a single instance
estimated annual cost per 10,000 employees
don’t want to work with the sender again
“AI produces drafts. People produce work. You are not finished until the draft is something you can stand behind in a room.”From The Guide
I add a guide here whenever I finish writing one. Same deal every time: free, no email, readable on the web or as a PDF.
If there's a decision you keep getting stuck on, email hi@davecto.com. The best guides start as someone else's question.
$ ls ~/resources | wc -l 16 $ ls -t ~/resources | head -3 paid-saas-vs-open-source.pdf 27pp decision-model-business-ideas.pdf 20pp brag-setup-guide.pdf 6pp next-guide.pdf writing