Thoughts on AI, building products, and the future of work. No fluff — just signal.
Three LiDAR-era scanning tools, three different jobs. A working design-build contractor breaks down what each one is actually good for on a job site — and where each one breaks.
Read: RoomPlan vs Matterport vs Polycam: which one belongs in your contractor's toolkit?Every Hawaii GC who hires subs is leaving money on the table if they don't understand §237-13(3)(B). A plain-English breakdown of the sub-deduction, what counts, what doesn't, and how to track it.
Read: Hawaii GET tax for contractors: how the §237-13(3)(B) sub-deduction actually worksThe five-step AI workflow we use to turn a site walk into a phase-by-phase scope of work in under a minute. With real numbers from real Honolulu renovations.
Read: How to scope a renovation in 60 seconds (and why your hand-written estimate keeps losing jobs)BlueWave Projects went from empty repo to a multi-tenant production SaaS running a real Hawaii residential renovation in 9 weeks of solo work. Here are the four architecture decisions that mattered, told honestly.
Read: Shipping a multi-tenant SaaS in 9 weeks with Claude Code: 3 decisions I'd make again, and 1 I wouldn'tHow the BlueWave Projects scope generator turns a RoomPlan scan and a few photos into a phase-by-phase scope of work in 60 seconds — and what it falls back to when the model gets squirrelly.
Read: LLM-in-the-loop scope generation: prompt caching, structured outputs, and the deterministic fallback ladderAn honest breakdown of where 15B Claude tokens went in one focused sprint of solo SaaS-building with Claude Code, what they actually cost, and the operator math behind agent-augmented engineering.
Read: Token economics: what 15 billion Claude tokens actually cost, and what they boughtEvery TMK parcel, every building footprint, every address in Hawaiʻi lives as TypeScript modules in a single Git repository. The whole geospatial corpus diffs in PRs and renders as a 3D map. Here's why I built it that way.
Read: Hawaii-as-code: why I put a state's worth of parcels in Git instead of a databaseEvery property in Hawaii has a TMK — a Tax Map Key that uniquely identifies the parcel across all four counties. It looks like a phone number but reads like a coordinate. Here's what every digit means and how to use it.
Read: The Hawaii TMK system, decoded — how to read a Tax Map Key and find any parcel in the stateThe big-name construction-management platforms were built for multi-region GCs running hundreds of jobs. Hawaii operators run different math — Hawaii GET, sub deductions at the 0.5% wholesale rate, TMK-aware permits, single-county jurisdictions. Here's the honest gap analysis.
Read: Why Buildertrend, Procore, and CoConstruct miss the mark for Hawaii operators (and what we built instead)We just opened the founding-member tier of the Aloha Off-Market Network — a closed-loop pocket-listing exchange for Hawaii agents and investors, backed by a mirror of every parcel in the state. Ten seats, free for life, in exchange for one off-market listing per quarter.
Read: The Aloha Off-Market Network — founding-member seats open for Hawaii real-estate operatorsEvery welcome email, billing receipt, and form notification reported success while silently bouncing. The cause: sending from an unverified apex domain instead of a verified subdomain — plus an API that returns the rejection as a value you have to check. A post-mortem.
Read: Our transactional email said it sent for weeks — and delivered nothingYou added a value to your env file, rebuilt the container, and it is still undefined in the browser. NEXT_PUBLIC_ variables are inlined at build time, but docker-compose env_file is runtime-only. Here is the fix, and how to confirm it took.
Read: Why your NEXT_PUBLIC_ env var is undefined in production — the Docker build-time trapA deploy can report success and ship nothing — green pipeline, healthy container, missing feature. The ten-second habit that catches it: grep the live production bundle for a string you just shipped (a literal, not a function name).
Read: A green health check is not a deploy — grep the bundleTwo people — or two AI agents — building against the same main branch is a recipe for collisions. Isolated git worktrees, fast-forward-only merges, and commit-by-name make parallel work safe instead of destructive.
Read: Shipping from many hands (and AI agents) into one repo without collisionsA directory that auto-generates a page per tag quietly accumulates hundreds of thin pages that tax your crawl budget. How we pulled about 900 pages out of the index with noindex and sitemap pruning — without deleting any real content.
Read: Pruning 13,000 pages for SEO without losing contentA single weekly event, modeled naively, becomes dozens of near-identical URLs that Google flags as duplicates. How we collapsed 532 recurring-event URLs to 98 with canonical dates — losing no events.
Read: Recurring events wreck your sitemap — the canonical-date dedup fixYou push checkout to production, run the 4242 test card to confirm it works, and it declines. Nothing is broken — test cards only work with test keys. How to actually QA a live payment funnel.
Read: Why your 4242 test card 'fails' in production — the Stripe live-key QA trapOn a small team the most expensive bug is the work you do twice because your notes, your task tracker, and reality disagreed. The three-way sync discipline — and why it gets load-bearing once AI agents are in the loop.
Read: Keep your task tracker, your notes, and reality in sync — or pay for it twiceA sea-service letter is one of the messiest documents in the maritime world — and the gate to every USCG license upgrade. How we built layout-aware document AI that turns an unstructured PDF into structured, validated sea time, with the human kept on the judgment.
Read: AI that reads a sea-service letter — turning a messy PDF into structured vessel timeEvery mariner working toward a radar endorsement has to learn to read a scope. We built a full WebGL radar and ARPA training simulator that runs in a browser tab — no install — with real relative-motion geometry, CPA/TCPA, trial maneuvers, and the IMO instruments.
Read: We built a full radar/ARPA trainer in the browser — WebGL, no installSTR compliance in Hawaii is a moving target — county rules, TAT/GET deadlines, inspection checklists. Here's how Hawaii hosts are using AI to stay compliant and cut the paperwork in half.
Read: AI tools every Hawaii short-term rental host should be using in 2026Hawaii's DCCA permit process is notoriously manual. Here's how contractors and property managers are using AI to track applications, catch expiration dates, and stop losing jobs to permit delays.
Read: Automating DCCA permit tracking in Hawaii: what's possible in 2026Hawaii's small boat harbors are some of the most active in the Pacific — and some of the most understaffed. Here's how AI tools are helping harbor managers handle slip assignments, vessel compliance, and tenant communications without growing headcount.
Read: How AI helps Hawaii harbor managers cut through the paperworkRunning a charter out of Hawaii means USCG compliance, DLNR licensing, booking management, and guest communications all at once. Here's how AI is cutting the admin load for Hawaii's maritime operators.
Read: AI tools for Hawaii fishing charter and tour operators: the practical guideBuilding a live 'will I see the aurora tonight' panel meant asking our solar-math a question it had never been asked before: is it dark RIGHT NOW. That question surfaced a real bug — at extreme longitudes, a day's computed sunset can come out numerically before its sunrise — sitting latent in code that had shipped fine for months.
Read: The sunrise/sunset bug that almost broke an honest aurora forecast