The software a business actually runs on: what it records, what it decides, and what it takes for it to do more of the work.
Business Systems
4 min read
Site owners are reporting October traffic drops, but Google's status dashboard shows no ranking update since the September spam update ended on 8 October. Eight checks, most of them free and under ten minutes, to find out whether the problem is Google or your own site.
Business Systems
5 min read
On 15 October Google announced five changes to the links in AI Mode and AI Overviews, including a test that puts official websites in their own section at the top of an answer. What Google said, what it did not say, and seven checks so a small business is the official site for its own name.
Business Systems
6 min read
Researchers found a hacker running AI agents against more than 1,200 websites, mostly online shops, at a rough cost of about $50 per successful break-in. Deere, SharkNinja and a Cummins vendor were among the sites named. How the agents got in, and six checks for a small business website that need no AI knowledge.
Business Systems
4 min read
Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 on 12 October, and its privacy policy allows user data to be shared in a sale of company assets. Forty state attorneys general have asked for protections. What it means for a business that types customer details into AI tools, and six things to check with every AI vendor you use.
Business Systems
3 min read
In English, one token is about four characters or three quarters of a word, so 1,000 words is roughly 1,300 tokens. Newer Claude models count about 30% more for the same text, and other languages count more again. What that means for the monthly bill, with a worked example on current prices.
Business Systems
3 min read
Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 lists at $0.10 per million input tokens, a tenth of Haiku 4.5. But prompts over 100,000 tokens pay five times more, and a new tokenizer counts about 30% more tokens for the same text. Two worked examples: one saves 87%, the other only 35%.
Business Systems
4 min read
An AI chatbot has three costs: building it, running it, and keeping it right. Off-the-shelf tools start around $20 a month; custom builds are quoted in the thousands. The model bill is usually the smallest line. A worked example at 12,000 messages a month comes to $7.80 on a small model and $156 on a mid-range one.
Business Systems
4 min read
A developer reported that an AI coding agent, running without approval prompts, deleted 48,218 project files and the Git history in 103 seconds. What went wrong, why Git was not a backup, and four settings to change before an agent touches your code.
Business Systems
6 min read
A preregistered experiment with 1,100 US users found that Google's AI Mode cut the share of searches ending in a website visit by 18.8 points. What the study shows, what it does not, and what a small business website should change.
Business Systems
4 min read
Teams budget for tokens and are surprised by memory. The bill you watch is rarely the constraint that decides whether an AI system stays up — and the failure it produces looks like a slow product, not an invoice.
Business Systems
5 min read
Systems of record store what people did. Systems that participate propose and execute within limits. What changes in the architecture: writes become the product, the audit log becomes a surface, and permissions move from roles to actions.
Let's build the system behind it. Tell us what the process is and where it breaks — the first conversation is about constraints, not technology.