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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How I Think About Building with AI (2026-02-15)
The distance to done is shrinking
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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How I Think About Building with AI (2026-02-15) :: View in Browser
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The Big Plug
Two new things to try out this week:
1. Got a stuck AI project? Try out Katie’s new, free AI Readiness Assessment tool. A simple quiz to help predict project success.
2. Wonder how your website is seen by AI? Try my new, free AI View tool (limited to 10 URLs per day). It looks at your site and tells you what an AI crawler likely sees.
Content Authenticity Statement
95% of this week’s newsletter content was originated by me, the human. You’ll see outputs from Claude Code in the opening segment. Learn why this kind of disclosure is a good idea and might be required for anyone doing business in any capacity with the EU in the near future.
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What’s On My Mind: How I Think About Building with AI
Last month, Hubspot cofounder Dharmesh Shah wrote this very hard-hitting LinkedIn post:
Here’s a quick tip on how to build an effective presence on LinkedIn. Too many people on LinkedIn are “performing” for their current (and future) followers. Instead of self-centered performing, focus on generous sharing. We all have something to share that will be helpful/useful to others. Things we are experts in or passionate about. What’s often even better is sharing mistakes we’ve made and lessons we’ve learned. Share, don’t perform and you’ll pull people in.
I loved this quote and thanks to the magic on the LinkedIn feed algorithms, I didn’t see it until last week. But it still hit. So in the spirit of sharing, let me share how I built an absolutely ridiculous thing recently for a conference so you can see what I do and how I do it. Take anything useful for yourself, leave the rest behind.
The Torrington Gopher Hole Museum
I was preparing for my keynote at the Tourism Industry Association of Alberta and wanted to showcase just how powerful AI is for even the smallest organization. But I needed an example of a very small place, the kind of place that doesn’t make headlines, that AI wouldn’t naturally recommend by itself. Ask ChatGPT or Claude where to go in Alberta and you’ll always get the high probability answers - Banff, Jasper, Calgary. And for good reason, they’re beautiful places. But they’re the places everyone else goes, so if you want a truly unique adventure, you’re probably not going to find it there.
No, the low probability places can only come from insider knowledge. So my first step was to find it. A while back, I wrote a content extraction tool that uses the Reddit developer API to extract the contents of subreddits, one at a time. You can’t scrape all of Reddit, nor should you, but you can absolutely dive deep on any one community. I fired up the tool and grabbed r/Alberta, r/Calgary, r/Edmonton, and a few other relevant communities. My software ingests the subreddit up to a specific number of days, then formats it for AI use by converting it to a machine-friendly language. My recommended default these days is YAML - although JSON is great and especially useful for structured table-like data (CSV to JSON is chefs kiss) YAML is WAY more efficient in terms of space taken up.
I loaded 150,000 conversations into NotebookLM and asked it a simple prompt, to find the off-the-beaten-path places that don’t make the top 10 lists for tourists, the rare places, the weird places. Places like the mining ghost town in Dorothy.
As an aside, this prompt template that is in Notebook LM for this that requests the frequency is a quality check of its own. For Notebook LM, which is based on Google Gemini, if you just say give me low frequency stuff, but you don’t ask it to try to infer what those frequencies are, you’re not going to get as good a result as spelling it out and giving it an actual template. So make sure that you do that.
Number 8 on the list caught my eye: the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum. It’s a museum in Torrington, Alberta, about an hour north of Calgary, and it has taxidermy stuffed gophers from the Alberta prairie dressed up in dioramas, scenes fo Alberta life. So weird. So wacky. I loved it. So I went to their website and it was… well, they’re doing the best they can with obviously very limited resources.
But this was a great candidate for showcasing what AI can do. Well-funded organizations can use AI to do cool stuff, but they could also afford to do cool stuff without it. A tiny operation that doesn’t have massive resources, rich donors, and robust cash flow is much more interesting to use as a case study because the before and after is much more stark.
Deciding What To Build
Now that I had an example of a great tourism-focused business, it was time to decide what to do. One of the perennial challenges of tourism-related businesses is seasonality. The Gopher Hole Museum is no exception; on their website, they say they’re closed for the season. That’s understandable - other than ski areas, Alberta’s tourism business gets quieter in the winters because the winters are often quite harsh.
But bills don’t stop just because business does. One of the key questions at the Tourism Advocacy Summit was how tourism businesses that are highly seasonal could become more like year-round businesses. It’s at this point where I bring out the ultimate agentic AI framework for planning and building: Katie Robbert’s Trust Insights 5P Framework. If you’re unfamiliar, it goes like this:
The 5Ps are Purpose, People, Process, Platform, and Performance.
Purpose - What is the question we’re trying to answer? What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
People - Who should you involve? Who needs to know about this?