Journal

Language models are good at reading a messy email and working out what the sender wants. They are also, occasionally, confidently wrong. In a business, the cost of a wrong reply to a customer is far higher than the cost of a person glancing at a draft.

So the agents I build prepare the work and stop. You see the draft, the reason it was chosen and the data it used, and you press approve, edit or discard. Over a few weeks the log shows which kinds of message are always approved unchanged; those are the only ones I would consider letting through automatically, and only with your say-so.

When I would drop the step: internal tidying jobs, like renaming files or filing receipts, where a mistake is cheap and easy to undo.

Hosted automation services usually charge by the number of tasks run. That is fine at a few hundred a month and painful at tens of thousands. n8n does the same job, connecting your inbox, spreadsheets and accounts software, but can run on a small server you control, with no per-task fee.

The trade-off is upkeep: someone has to update it and watch it. For clients on monthly care, that is me. For a business with two or three simple automations and low volume, a hosted service is often the better choice, and I will say so.

PostgreSQL has been developed in the open for decades, is free to use, and is supported by every hosting company worth using. It handles customer records, bookings, documents and search comfortably at small-business scale.

One database means one thing to back up, one thing to secure and one thing the next developer needs to understand. I would add something else only for a specific, measured need, and I have not yet needed to on a small-business project.

The old way to reach an office server from home was to open a hole in the firewall, or buy a VPN appliance. Both need careful upkeep, and both are common ways in for attackers.

Tailscale builds a private network between approved devices instead. Nothing is exposed to the wider internet, and removing a leaver’s access is a single click. It is free for very small teams and modestly priced per user above that; the main thing to weigh is that it relies on an outside company for coordination.

restic takes encrypted, space-efficient backups and sends them to a second location: another building, or a cloud storage bucket. It is free and well-tested, and the encryption means the storage provider cannot read your data.

The tool is the easy part. What protects you is a routine: once a month a backup is restored to a spare machine and checked. Clients on monthly care get a short note confirming it was done, and what was restored.

I use AI coding assistants, including Claude, for the repetitive parts of a build: boilerplate, tests, first drafts of routine screens. That time saving shows up in lower quotes.

Every line still goes through me before it reaches your system, and your data is never pasted into a tool without your agreement. If your contract or sector rules out these tools entirely, tell me at the start and I will price the work without them.