Weeknotes vol. 1: The end beginning of an era
By Garrett,

This was a big week and a good one to start doing weeknotes.
I moved into a cozy new office that’s much closer to the house than the one I had downtown. It came with a standing desk, too, so I’m all tech’d up and ready to go.
Phil and Leon had been working on the Better than good website and branding, which we finally launched on Monday. Speaking of Monday, it was also the 11 year anniversary of Good Work, the web development company I started in 2014.
Phil had the idea of a thumbs up logo and a table of judges holding up ‘11’ signs, and Leon really nailed the delivery. There’s nothing more better than good than having 4 opposable thumbs.
I wrote a blog post, which I haven’t done in a while and am excited to get back into.
Half way through the week we landed on a name and design direction for the app we’ve been prototyping away at for the last few months. It’s a productivity tool for web, iOS and Mac born out of my own daily frustrations. The name fits perfectly—simple yet distinctive. More soon.
I did some housekeeping by securing social media accounts, buying domain names, etc. I set up accounts for both Better than good and our first app on Mastodon, Bluesky, X and Instagram. Maybe it’s my OCD talking, but cross referencing the two things on each corresponding account, using a consistent voice, was more of a task than I had imagined.
I found qbyt.
On the code front, I got stuck on an issue with the Stripe integration for the entire week. I’ve been tackling the harder development challenges while design is being worked through—namely user authentication and billing. While integrating Stripe to manage plans, subscriptions, and payment methods, I couldn’t get credit cards to attach to users (a Stripe requirement for subscriptions). I checked, checked, and checked some more, and everything seemed right. Turns out I just needed to add window. to a single spot in my app/javascript/application.js file and we were back in business.
Phew, I feel a lot better about this week having written this all out.
Until next time.
Like this? Get email updates or grab the RSS feed like it’s 2008.
More from the blog
-

The sorting machine: recruitment’s race to the bottom
> The sorting machine was built to cope with a genuine problem. Where it went wrong was in mistaking efficiency for effectiveness, in assuming that the ability to process resumes fast meant the ability to evaluate candidates well. The fix is not a smarter machine but a more modest one, paired with humans who are given the time, the tools, and the structured information to do what they were always better at.If you've been involved in any part of the recruitment process, the last 18 months have been dispiriting, to say the least. Hiring became a closed loop. Employers adopted applicant tracking…
-

Weighing smoke: why GEO dashboards are mostly useless
> The promise of a tool that gives you similar search visibility to the pre-agent world is understandably seductive. But before you eagerly hand over your cash for a platform, consider whether an afternoon's work a month might be a more cost-effective alternative.I recently wrote about [the GEO chimera](https://betterthangood.xyz/blog/geo-practice-versus-snake-oil/), the cottage industry promising to optimise your brand into AI answers. My argument was that the levers being sold mostly did not exist. Another part of the industry is selling gauges rather than levers. Estimates of the spend on …
-

Another nice mess
Somewhere in your business right now, someone is assembling a picture that no single app can provide. It may be the project manager pulling hours from Harvest and budget data from the finance tool to assess whether the engagement is still viable. Maybe it's you on a Sunday, because what you need is not any one number from a system, but the pattern across three of them. The cloud gave small businesses access to the best software they had ever had, priced monthly and built for specific purposes. But twenty years of sensibly chosen apps have left the average small business with a patchwork data …
-

The state and the machine
> What little we saw of Fable and Mythos offers both cause for excitement and concern. It was widely and credibly seen as a model of a completely different caliber from those that had come before. Perhaps the risks in this instance were overstated or amplified for political ends. What is more profound is that the short time we had with the models offered a clear glimpse of a future in which a single company is making significant progress toward a superintelligence with the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation-states or even massive corporations. That juncture was never going to ar…
-

We have ways of making you pay
> The true cost of AI work is hard to measure; the value of AI work is also hard to measure, and metering changes which of those two blindnesses you notice first. It drags the cost into the light, itemised and arriving monthly, while the value stays diffuse, lagging and easy to argue about. That asymmetry is exactly why the panic is showing up now, ahead of any definitive verdict on whether the spending was worth it.Simon Willison did the arithmetic on himself. He pays $200 a month across his Anthropic and OpenAI consumer plans, and when he ran the [ccusage](https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusa…
