Changelog — Michael Kaminski
Every sizable update in one place: a site going live, an essay published, a clip posted, a piece of platform work landing. Each entry is dated the day it shipped and links to the thing itself.
- · Site launch — The Demand Test — nine ideas, fourteen days, zero spend: A public validation experiment running August 17–31: nine business ideas, each with its own landing page and its own pass/fail threshold — a booked call, a $1 refundable deposit, a written reply. One idea gets built on August 30, and the data behind the pick is published with it. ten-experiments.vercel.app
- · Site launch — Demand Desk — the funnel behind the demand test: The instrumentation half of the demand test: nine landing-page funnels compared side by side on one dashboard, so the August 30 decision is read off a chart rather than argued. Access is allowlisted; the public entry point is the sign-in screen. demand-desk-rho.vercel.app
- · Site launch — DealPacket — one address in, a packet every party can read: Real-estate underwriting as an MCP server. One address returns ARV, rent estimates, comps and ownership, then renders the same packet five ways — investor, GC, lender, CPA, title — with the source and fetch timestamp printed next to every figure so the recipient can verify instead of trust. dealpacket.vercel.app
- · Site launch — The Genome of Games — an ontology of game mechanics: 168 mechanics, 618 games, 394 studios and 4,366 inheritance links from 1962 to 2025. Mechanics are grouped by the design problem they solve rather than by genre, and every one traces its descent — contextual execution in Gears of War back to collision detection in Spacewar!. genome-of-games.vercel.app Source
- · Feature — Added this changelog: A running log of every sizable update: sites launched, essays published, clips posted, platform work shipped. Essays and clips derive from their own data files, so the page updates itself when the writing routine runs. You are here
- · Feature — Field clips get transcripts and VideoObject schema: A ten-second vertical video is opaque to every crawler that matters, so /clips writes the spoken line and the finding behind it into the static HTML and into VideoObject schema. Clips that tease an essay now attach to that essay in the prerendered markup too. /clips
- · Open source — launch-template — a new product launch in under fifteen minutes: A repo template that stands up a marketing site, analytics, database, payments and booking for a new idea in one command. One Vercel project per launch so each gets its own domain and deploy cadence; everything underneath is shared and joined by a single launch_slug. This is the machine the demand test runs on. MAKaminski/launch-template
- · Field clip — The gate that stops nothing: A statistical gate on an agent's instruction file, and the power calculation that shows the 5% threshold written next to it never binds. At this variance a 14-day window catches a true 5% lift 44% of the time — a coin flip on your own best edits. Watch the clip
- · Field clip — Zero trades, and the level still moved: A dealer-gamma pipeline walked the QQQ gamma flip 3.9 points and dropped the put wall ten dollars across eight consecutive writes with spot pinned at 717.12. Nothing traded. An overwritten file has no history to argue with — one append-only CSV is what caught it. Watch the clip
- · Essay — Shipping an AI Agent Through Compliance Review in Regulated Lending: On May 12, 2025 the CFPB withdrew 67 guidance documents in a single notice, including both circulars covering adverse-action notices for complex algorithms. The underlying duty did not move. Build the agent against the statute and against the evidence it will have to produce — starting with a 120-day retention floor that most agent logs miss. Read the essay
- · Feature — Prerendered the SPA so crawlers see prose, not a stub: The site is a CRA single-page app, so the HTML leaving the server was <div id="root"></div> and nothing else — the portfolio and the writing were effectively invisible to search and LLM crawlers. A postbuild step now writes real prose into #root for the home page, /writing and every essay, with no headless browser and no new dependencies. /writing
- · Feature — Charts and per-article social cards for the essays: Essays got generated figures — a retention floor, an animated counter bug — plus a per-article OG card so a shared link carries the piece rather than the site-wide image. The figure generator is checked in, so the charts are reproducible rather than pasted screenshots.
- · Essay — Statistical Gating for Agent Instruction Changes: Every edit to an agent's instruction file is an experiment. Mine requires a statistically significant improvement — Welch's t-test, p < 0.10, at least a 5% lift — against a 14-day rolling baseline before the change is allowed to stay. Then the power calculation showed the 14-day window can only detect a 0.97 standard-deviation shift, which makes the 5% threshold decorative. Read the essay
- · Essay — I Gave My Website a Voice, and the Voice Was the Easy Part: There is now a digital twin on my homepage you can talk to out loud, hands-free, in a clone of my voice. Getting it to sound like me took an afternoon. Getting it to sound like a person took rewriting how it writes. Read the essay
- · Site launch — Commitgraph — GitHub leaderboards that show the data: Worldwide, country and city rankings for the most active developers on GitHub. Existing ranking sites ship a paginated table of logins and one number; this one adds 371-day contribution heatmaps, rank-movement bump charts, a tile-grid world map, and a follower/contribution scatter that shows fame and output are different axes. It also labels what it does not know. top-github-users-amber.vercel.app Source
- · Site launch — YardLine and VendorLink go live: Two marketplaces in one week. YardLine is a roster-gated prospecting CRM for heavy-duty truck salvage yards around metro Atlanta; VendorLink pairs event organizers with local vendors through profiles, one-click applications, digital contracts and payment. yard-line.vercel.app vendor-link-web.vercel.app
- · Feature — A voice-capable digital twin on the home page: An ElevenLabs-backed twin that answers questions about the work out loud, with hands-free conversation mode, TTS-aware text so it reads numbers like a person, and a visible reason when a speech request is rejected instead of silent failure.
- · Essay — I Shipped the Same Pull Request Twice and Only Noticed the Second Time: Behind the Build, Vol. 8: two new tabs — Websites and Products — landed a day apart and turned out to be the exact same diff wearing different screenshots. What that repetition taught me about when a pattern is worth abstracting (and when it very much is not). Read the essay
- · Essay — Every URL on My Site Returns 200, Including the Ones That Don't Exist: Behind the Build, Vol. 7: I had to prove four recovered articles were actually live, and discovered my own verification was a test that could never fail. The fix came from a filename. Read the essay
- · Essay — My Automations Didn't Crash. They Just Stopped Talking.: Behind the Build, Vol. 6: the daily-article robot quietly skipped four days without erroring once. A look at the fleet of small agents I now run across a portfolio site, a trading account, a resale business, and a spend audit — and why silence is the failure mode nobody instruments for. Read the essay
- · Site launch — COT Signal — CFTC positioning for Bitcoin and Ether: Weekly CME futures positioning read straight off the Commitments of Traders report: asset managers, hedge funds and dealers, net long against net short, with no interpretation layer between the filing and the chart. cot-signal.vercel.app
- · Essay — My Portfolio's Robot Diarist Cloned Itself Three Times, and They All Wrote About the Same Week: Behind the Build, Vol. 5: I sat down to write today's "what I shipped" entry and found three separate unmerged pull requests already fighting over the same volume number. A classic race condition, just wearing a writer's hat. Read the essay
- · Essay — I Built Analytics to Watch My Site, and Discovered It Was Watching Nothing: Behind the Build, Vol. 4: wiring up real product analytics turned up a silent reverse proxy eating every POST request, a dropped entry pageview, and a Gantt chart bug where two bars collided despite their dates never touching. Read the essay
- · Essay — I Got Locked Out of My Own GitHub Account (Sort Of), So I Found the Back Door: Behind the Build, Vol. 3: adding a Products tab for my desktop tools meant fetching screenshots from repos my own session wasn't allowed to touch — and learning the honest way to handle a missing screenshot instead of faking one. Read the essay
- · Feature — Added the Products directory: A home for the desktop tools and open-source utilities that live on GitHub rather than on a URL — the macOS monitor, the touchscreen daemon, the on-device context capture. /products
- · Essay — I Built a Blog That Yells at Me If Two Robots Write the Same Diary Entry: Behind the Build, Vol. 2: today's work was a new Websites tab showcasing live production sites, plus a small guardrail that stops this very writing series from ever double-booking a day. Read the essay
- · Feature — Added the Websites directory: A directory of every production site running under the Kaminski Vercel account, each card linking straight to the live deploy. It has grown from four entries to twenty-one since. /websites
- · Essay — Why Fintech Belongs in Atlanta — and Why That Matters for Your Cap Table: Atlanta quietly processes a huge share of the world's card transactions and has produced a run of fintech exits. Here's what that ecosystem means for founders building here — and the finance-plus-engineering talent it creates. Read the essay
- · Feature — Rebuilt the site on a dark editorial theme: A full redesign: one dark palette with an electric-yellow accent, kinetic motion, a company-logo marquee in the hero, and role-specific landing pages that no longer leak a pastel background onto the home page when a role is persisted. Home
- · Essay — I Spent a Day Teaching Robots How to Read My Résumé (So You Don't Have To): Behind the Build, Vol. 1: a lighthearted look at the SEO/AEO overhaul of this very site — JSON-LD schema soup, an llms.txt for AI crawlers, and the great WebP-ification of my own face. Read the essay
- · Essay — Fractional CFO vs. Fractional CTO: Which Does Your Early Fintech Need First?: A practical guide for fintech founders deciding between fractional CFO and CTO help — the signals that tell you which seat is actually on fire, and how to sequence the two. Read the essay
- · Essay — Quality of Earnings, Explained for Fintech Founders: What a Quality of Earnings (QoE) analysis actually looks at, why fintech QoE is different, and how founders can be ready before a buyer or lender runs one. Read the essay
- · Essay — Why Your Fintech's CFO Should Be Able to Read the Codebase: In fintech the ledger is the product. A finance leader who can read the code that produces the numbers removes the most expensive translation layer in the company. Read the essay