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 install