Practical essays on AI, product, and SMB growth.
Plain-spoken, opinionated, and written for the people doing the work.
Choosing a Decision API in 2026: My Practical Framework
Thirteen decision APIs, five questions, five short picks. The five-question framework a Fractional CTO uses to pick a decision API vendor in late 2026 — plus why Jev stays the default while I A/B test the alternatives.
AI StrategyWhere Decision Models Fit in an AI Agent Stack
A fast decision model belongs in front of expensive LLM calls — routing, tool selection, loop-break and escalation. The two-speed agent pattern, with a reference architecture builders can copy.
AI StrategyOpen-Weight Decision Models: Can You Run Your Own Jev?
Kev, Laya, Tev1 and Cloudflare's Clef put open-weight decision models in reach. Here's the honest tradeoff — privacy and control vs GPU cost, ops work, and license fine print — and the volume math that decides whether self-hosting pays.
AI StrategyCalibration Is the Feature Nobody Is Talking About
The decision model industry has started a benchmark war on accuracy. Meanwhile the number that actually determines whether you can automate — calibration — barely gets a slide. Here is why calibration, not raw accuracy, is the under-discussed quality bar in 2026.
AI StrategyBe Careful With 'Beats Jev': How to Read Decision Model Benchmarks
Most 'beats Jev' claims come from the vendors themselves, often on benchmarks the model was trained near. Here's a 2026 field guide to decoding decision model benchmark charts — plus a one-afternoon protocol to test any vendor on your own data.
AI StrategyThe One-Line Migration: Which Jev Competitors Accept the Same Requests
Liquid AI's d1, Nace.AI's Drex, Celeris-1, and Upstage's Solar Decide all accept TypeSafe Jev's request format. Why that wire compatibility makes A/B testing vendors almost free — and how to build a provider-abstraction layer so you are never locked in.
AI Strategy13 Decision APIs in 3 Weeks: A Builder's Map of the Market
From TypeSafe's Jev to Cloudflare's Clef, OpenAI, Microsoft, Liquid AI, Upstage, AWS, and smaller open-weight entrants — a market map of the decision API category and why it commoditized the moment it was created.
AI StrategyThree Weeks From Launch to Clone: OpenAI Enters the Decisions Market
OpenAI previewed its Decisions API at DevDay 2026, fourteen days after TypeSafe AI launched Jev. A deep-dive on GPT-6 Luna's pricing, image input, and what the clone timing says about the decision model category.
AI StrategyWhat Is a 'System One' Model, and Why Should Builders Care?
A System One model is an AI tuned to decide, not deliberate — a label, score, or probability in milliseconds. A plain-English explainer for builders, with the Kahneman origin and when it beats an LLM calling structured outputs.
AI StrategyI Stopped Asking My AI to Write. I Started Asking It to Decide.
A first-person account of the mindset flip that reshaped my book platform: moving five structured judgments from a chat LLM to a decision model, and what changed in how I design AI calls.
AI StrategyGetting Started: Your First Decision Model Experiment
A coach-walks-you-through-it guide to your first decision model experiment in a single day: pick a repetitive task, write the question, and test on 20 real examples before you invest further.
AI StrategyDo You Need to Be a Developer to Benefit From This?
A plain-English guide for non-technical founders, ops leaders, and product managers: how decision APIs actually work, how no-code tools expose them, and the questions to ask your tech team or vendor before you buy.
AI StrategyOpenAI, Microsoft and Cloudflare Joined In: Why That Matters
Within 24 days of TypeSafe AI's Jev launch, OpenAI, Microsoft, and reportedly Cloudflare all shipped their own decision APIs. Here's why that speed signals category validation — and why builders should treat decision models as infrastructure, not an experiment.
AI StrategyHow I Use a Decision Model in My Own Product
A field report from my book platform: three places I replaced chatty AI calls with Jev's typed decisions — quote verification, section quality rating, and collection sorting — and the code I got to delete.
AI StrategyFive Everyday Business Tasks a Decision API Can Handle
The non-technical guide to five back-office jobs a decision API quietly automates for small teams — support routing, content flagging, lead scoring, expense categorization, and form triage — mapped to Choose, Rate, and Verify.
AI StrategyWhy '70% Sure' Is More Useful Than 'Yes'
Decision models return a confidence score with every answer. Here's how to use it to automate the easy cases, flag the unclear ones, and build a cheap human-in-the-loop system without a data science team.
AI StrategyThe Three Questions a Decision Model Can Answer
Every decision an AI can make for you in software reduces to three shapes: choose from a list, rate on a scale, or verify yes-or-no. A plain-English guide to the three decision shapes, with examples and when to use each.
AI StrategyChatbot vs Decision Model: What's the Difference?
A chatbot writes you a paragraph; a decision model gives you a typed answer. A plain-English guide to how they differ, when to use each, and how the best AI products combine both.
AI StrategyWhat Is Jev? A Plain-English Explanation
Jev is TypeSafe AI's September 2026 decision model: feed it information and a question, get back a typed answer — not a paragraph. A plain-English guide to what Jev is, how it works, and whether it belongs in your stack.
AI StrategyNot Every AI Needs to Talk: Meet the Decision API
Chatbots get the headlines, but a quieter kind of AI — the Decision API — is doing the actual work inside modern software. What it is, when to reach for it instead of a chat completion, and the four patterns builders use most.
Fractional CTOWhy a Fractional CTO is the right call for SMBs in 2026
Hiring a full-time CTO too early burns runway. Hiring too late leaves you with sprawling architecture and accidental contracts. There's a middle path.
AI StrategyAn AI strategy for SMB owners that survives contact with reality
A pragmatic playbook for SMB owners deciding what to do (and not do) with AI in the next 12 months.
Zero-to-LaunchHow to ship a real product in 90 days when you've never done it before
A practical week-by-week framework for non-technical founders aiming for a real launch — not a demo — in three months.