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Shock Surplus teardown: jack stands, cold coffee, wrong Bronco
The Bronco is on jack stands and the year is still blank. Search puts a 2021 kit next to a 1980 kit, free shipping has three answers, and Add to Cart does not wait.
The writing archive / Nick Jensen
Notes from the workbench.
Building products, leading teams, and figuring things out in public. Practical ideas from the work, with the rough edges left in.
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88 articles from the workbench
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By Rosie Jane teardown: "I said candy"
Tell Scent Finder you like things that smell sweet like candy. It asks for an email, then names Rosie Perfume. Dulce is the candy bottle, and it never shows.
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Bean Goods teardown: 486 out of 492
486 out of 492. Type gift on Bean Goods and you get almost the whole store. The size chart on a first-row hoodie still lists a size you cannot buy.
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Heaven Mayhem teardown: how to buy gold hoops in five steps
How to buy gold hoops on Heaven Mayhem, in five easy steps. Type gold hoops. Get 129 results. Meet a knot. Scroll to 12 for the other hoop.
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Carter Eve Jewelry teardown: the $3,000 typo
A $3,000 necklace and a typo are about the same size. Storybook asks you to email info@carteve.com. The rest of the shop already uses info@cartereve.com.
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Bushbalm teardown: a 1 minute quiz that takes two quizzes
Here's a bet. START NOW on Bushbalm still opens the leftover quiz. The one they kept is already in the nav.
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Kōv Essentials teardown: five fit questions, then an email wall before the size
Find Your Fit asked five hair questions, then asked for an email before it showed a size. After I skipped, it named Soul Clip in Black XL. That size was sold out.
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BK Beauty teardown: 75 results for foundation brush, and a one-sentence bestseller
I searched foundation brush on bkbeauty.com and got 75 results. Filters are Availability and Price. The 101 Contoured Foundation, with 3,955 reviews, still has a one-sentence description.
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Beardbrand teardown: a fragrance house whose scent quiz lives on another URL
The homepage says Beardbrand is a fragrance house disguised as a beard care company. Find My Fragrance opens a story page. The Typeform quiz they already built is not on the product page.
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Chisos teardown: fourteen sizes gone, and Add to Cart still wants a 7
On the No. 2 in Magic Black EE, fourteen of fifteen sizes are crossed out. Size 7 still has one pair. Add to Cart is ready.
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Bombas teardown: the AI already knows it runs small, and the size picker does not
On the Women's Plush Sunday Slipper, an AI review summary says it runs small. That sentence lives below Add to Bag, under a closed Size and Fit accordion.
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Rothy's teardown: a no-return shoe, and a store finder that waits for your size
The Point II page I captured is machine washable, comes in Medium and Wide, and has thousands of reviews. It is also final sale, covered by a $20-off popup, and will not show nearby store stock until you pick a size.
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Allbirds teardown: an AI shopping assistant on a store that keeps saying no
Allbirds put AI help on every page. The bigger problem is what shoppers hit before and after it: sold-out sizes, a 30-day shipping warning, and an email-only help page.
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Mejuri teardown: stores that work as warehouses, and a website that hides them
Mejuri turned its stores into fulfillment hubs on Shopify. The website still makes you pick a size before it tells you whether a store has the piece.
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Warby Parker teardown: they retired Home Try-On and kept the best replacement in the app
Warby Parker sunset Home Try-On and pointed shoppers at Virtual Try-On, a quiz, and an AI Advisor. On the website, the Advisor is the piece that is missing.
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Build, buy, or integrate: deciding before the code starts
Give a practical decision framework for software ownership and integration risk.
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Give coding agents a boundary before you give them a task
Define agent authority, review gates, and escalation behavior.
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A handoff your next engineer can actually use
Make operational ownership and maintainability part of a product delivery.
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Front-end events are an API contract
Make event ownership, identity, schemas, and validation visible across UI and data systems.
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Where human review belongs in an AI production workflow
Explain review queues, acceptance criteria, and recovery rather than model-demo hype.
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The migration is not done when the new database is online
Explain reconciliation, cutover, late writes, and rollback boundaries.
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Performance work starts with the user journey
Show how to prioritize observed delays and verify a change without chasing a vanity score.
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Testing AI-generated code beyond the green checkmark
Demonstrate how to test behavior and assumptions rather than generated implementation details.
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Retries are a product feature: designing duplicate-safe workflows
How stable request identities, atomic persistence, and separate delivery states let a user retry without silently creating duplicate work.
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How to evaluate a product engineer through their work
A practical hiring conversation around inspectable artifacts: product decisions, implementation boundaries, operational ownership, and tradeoffs.
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What I would do in the first 30 days as a fractional engineering leader
A proposed first-month approach to fractional engineering leadership: understand the system, review decisions, agree ownership, and establish a useful cadence.
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Scoping a software build before you estimate it
A practical way to turn an ambiguous software request into a reviewable scope: outcome, constraints, exclusions, acceptance checks, and ownership.
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We're Leaving Shopify Behind (Again). Here's the Migration Playbook.
We are migrating TonyRobbins.com from Shopify Storefront API to native Stripe checkout. Not because Shopify is bad. Because we outgrew what it can do for us. Here is the 8-phase playbook we are using to do it without breaking anything.
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How I Run 3 Engineering Teams with 1 AI Brain
I manage three engineering teams across two products with an AI system that runs daily standups, triages PRs, monitors production, and manages my inbox. Here is the actual architecture and what it gets wrong.
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Claude Code's Source Leaked. Here Are 7 Things I'd Change.
The Claude Code source code became publicly accessible. I spent a day reading it. The engineering is impressive, but there's an architectural blind spot: the system optimizes for content delivery but not attention management. Here are 7 concrete changes I'd make.
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Plugins Are Wasting Your Tokens, Thanks Vercel
I traced where my context window was going during a Claude Code session. A single plugin injected 48,000 tokens of irrelevant documentation across 6 turns. Here's what I found and why plugin architecture for AI coding tools needs a rethink.
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The 200-Line Rule That Changed How I Ship Code with AI
When I first let AI agents write code autonomously, the PRs were enormous. One constraint changed everything.
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I Built a Brain with Claude Code — Here's How It Runs My Engineering Org
One prompt. No additional input. I let Claude make all the decisions — project structure, skills, scheduling, everything planned around my desired outcome. Here's what happened.
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I Taught My AI Agent How to Write Architecture Decision Records
Most teams abandon Architecture Decision Records because they're too hard to sustain. This post shows how I turned Olaf Zimmermann's ADR research into an AI agent skill that handles readiness, creation, anti-pattern detection, completeness, and lifecycle management.
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I Built an Autonomous Coding Swarm. Here's What I Learned.
This isn't a post about replacing developers. I'm a developer. I like being employed. This is about what happens when you stop treating AI coding tools as fancy autocomplete and start treating them as actual teammates.
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Product updates
I have been spending a lot of time with Claude Code recently. There have been so many great updates pushed by the team at Anthropic lately that it is hard to keep up with.
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Stripe Checkout: From Payment Processing to Conversion Optimization Engine
What if checkout was not an engineering-owned system at all? What if it was a marketing-owned conversion tool, built on solid engineering foundations? This is the story of how we rebuilt checkout from the ground up. Not as a form. As a platform.
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From Email to Instant Close: How I Built a Proposal System That Actually Gets Results
Tired of proposals disappearing into email purgatory? I built a Next.js + Sanity system that transforms static PDFs into interactive web experiences with one-click acceptance, instant notifications, and optional Stripe payments. Here's how it works and why it converts better.
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Introducing the Nano Banana Image Generator Plugin for Sanity Studio
If you're using Sanity Studio for content management, you know how crucial great imagery is for your projects. This plugin brings the power of Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model directly into your Sanity Studio interface.
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Supercharge Your Sanity CMS Development with Claude Code Plugins
Discover Sanity Agents - 7 powerful Claude Code plugins that revolutionize Sanity CMS development with AI-powered schema building, GROQ optimization, and zero-downtime migrations.
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Claude Code Plugins: Boost Developer Productivity with AI-Powered Development Tools
Discover how Claude Code plugins transform software development with customizable AI workflows, specialized agents, and team collaboration features. Learn practical implementation strategies for individual developers and engineering teams.
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From AI Assistant to 10x Engineer: Building a Production-Grade Claude Code Workflow
You start your day excited. Claude Code is going to help you crush this feature. Three hours later, you're staring at TypeScript errors you didn't catch, inconsistent code patterns, and Claude confidently telling you those 47 errors are "unrelated to our changes."
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Optimizing CLAUDE.md: How to Scale Your Codebase Documentation for AI Assistants
Treat CLAUDE.md as an index, not an encyclopedia. Extract detailed patterns to /docs/claude/, use tables instead of prose, and teach discovery over solutions. We reduced our file from 1,400 to 420 lines while maintaining code quality.
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Building an Ecommerce Shop with Sanity Part 1: Why We Are Leaving Shopify Behind
Why we left Shopify behind and started building a custom ecommerce experience with Sanity CMS. This is Part 1 of a technical series covering the full build.
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Building an Interactive Proposal System with Sanity CMS
How we built a complete proposal management system with digital signatures, payment integration, email notifications, and a drag-and-drop Kanban board—all powered by Sanity CMS.
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From Dashboards to Conversations: What Happens When AI Can Actually Talk to Your Data
Instead of dashboards and filters, I just type things like: "Which campaigns are driving the highest qualified leads by lifecycle stage?" "How did ROAS shift after the new creative went live?"
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Javascript basics for Google Tag Manager
Master the JavaScript fundamentals you need for Google Tag Manager. From variables and functions to DOM manipulation, these basics will level up your GTM skills.
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The hidden costs of meetings
Meetings are silently draining your team's productivity and budget. Here's how to calculate their true cost and reclaim your most valuable resource: time.
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Your A/B test is lying to you
Your A/B tests are giving you false confidence. Most testing setups produce misleading results because of flawed methodology, not flawed tools. Here's how to fix it.
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Another use case for HubSpot custom events
Custom events allow you to define and track events that are unique to your business. Custom events can be tied to event properties, which you can then use across HubSpot's tools.
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Google Tag Manager Essentials: A Comprehensive Guide
A comprehensive guide to Google Tag Manager covering setup, tags, triggers, variables, and best practices. Updated for 2026 with server-side tagging, consent mode, and AI-assisted tag management.
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Tools of the trade...
The tools I rely on daily keep evolving. Here is the original 2024 list, what changed, and the stack that actually powers my work in 2026.
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How do you integrate ChatGPT into your automation workflows?
ChatGPT is powerful on its own, but integrating it into your existing automation workflows is where the real magic happens. Here's how to get started.
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1 million opt-ins in 26 days…
We generated 1 million opt-ins in just 26 days. Here's the strategy, the execution, and the lessons learned from scaling a campaign that fast.
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7 Lessons Marketing Ops Can Learn from Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift runs marketing ops better than most companies. Seven lessons on audience segmentation, data-driven decisions, and community building.
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Rocking Marketing Ops: Lessons from Bring Me The Horizon
Bring Me The Horizon keeps reinventing themselves and winning new fans. Here's what marketing ops teams can learn from their approach to staying relevant.
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Leveraging AI for Problem-Solving
AI isn't just for automation. It's a powerful thinking partner for solving complex problems. Here's how to integrate it into your decision-making process.
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AI: Your Job's Future Isn't What You Think
I wrote this in 2023 saying AI would augment jobs, not replace them. Two and a half years later, here is what actually happened and what I got right and wrong.
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Remove the Minutiae
The small tasks are eating your calendar alive. Here's how to identify the minutiae, eliminate it, and refocus on work that actually moves the needle.
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Swing And A Miss
Not every experiment lands. Here's what I learned from a swing and a miss, and why failure is a feature of the process, not a bug.
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Treating The Symptoms
You're putting out fires instead of preventing them. Here's how to stop treating symptoms and start fixing the root causes that keep your team stuck.
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Your first 100 subscribers
The first 100 subscribers are the hardest to get. Here are practical, no-BS strategies to start building your email list from zero.
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Solving Problems Like Steve
Steve Jobs didn't just build products. He solved problems differently. Here's what his approach teaches us about simplicity and focus.
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Where do SaaS ideas come from?
Stop looking for startup ideas. The best SaaS products come from solving problems you already have. Here's where to find them.
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Voting For The Homecoming Queen
Business isn't a popularity contest. Stop chasing vanity metrics and start measuring what actually matters for growth.
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So, you want to build a startup? Quit looking for startup ideas.
Quit hunting for the perfect startup idea. The best businesses start with a problem you can't stop thinking about, not a brainstorming session.
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Delivering a Better Customer Experience
Customer experience isn't about grand gestures. It's about consistently delivering small improvements that compound over time.
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The Stories We Tell
Features don't sell products. Stories do. The narratives we build around our work shape how people experience and value what we create.
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Proof First
Too many builders skip validation. A proof-first mindset saves you from building something nobody wants.
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Cut The Crap
Most of what fills your day doesn't matter. Cut the noise, focus on what moves the needle, and watch your output change.
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Learning Without Action Is Just Entertainment
Consuming content feels productive. It's not. Real growth happens when you stop learning and start doing.
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Talk To Me!
Stop broadcasting. Start having real conversations with your customers. The difference between talking to and talking at defines your brand.
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Open Tab Syndrome
If you have 47 browser tabs open right now, this post is for you. Open tab syndrome is a productivity killer disguised as multitasking.
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Product Habits
Great products don't just solve problems -- they build habits. Here's how to design features that naturally keep users engaged.
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Getting Lost In The Woods
Getting lost isn't failure. It's exploration. Sometimes the detour is exactly what you needed to find the right path forward.
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Success Comes From Playing Games
The most successful people treat work like a game. Clear rules, measurable progress, and leveling up. Here's how to apply game thinking to your career.
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Know your customers better than a concierge.
The best businesses know their customers better than a hotel concierge. Here's how to build that level of understanding at scale.
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Importance of Routine
Routine feels boring until you see the compound effect. Consistent daily habits are the secret weapon of every builder who ships.
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How To Create A Losing Product
Want to guarantee your product fails? Follow this anti-playbook. Most products lose for the same preventable reasons.
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The Battle For Your Digital Soul
Big tech is fighting for your attention, data, and habits. It's time to understand the battlefield and take back control.
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I run this lonely road
Building is lonely. No one sees the vision until it's real. Here's what keeps you running when the road feels empty.
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Squirrel!
Another new tool. Another exciting idea. Another half-finished project. Shiny object syndrome is real, and here's how to beat it.
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Product Validation
The graveyard of failed products is full of ideas that were never validated. Test your assumptions before you build.
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Renting Your Runway
You don't need a massive war chest to start. Rent your runway, bootstrap smart, and extend your timeline to profitability.
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Start Small & Stay Lean
Don't scale what isn't working. Start small, stay lean, and only grow the things that have proven themselves.
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Lessons learned from building stuff that nobody wants
I've built things nobody wanted. The lessons were painful but invaluable. Here's what I learned so you don't repeat my mistakes.
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Slow Down to Go Fast
Moving fast without direction is just motion. Sometimes the fastest path forward is slowing down to think, plan, and validate.
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Do you know who is watching?
Low engagement doesn't mean no one's watching. Your silent audience is bigger than you think. Keep showing up.