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Ideas on
building intelligence.
Field notes on AI platforms, models, agents and shipping intelligent products, written to be useful, not to sell.
Grok joins T1 (as a fallback, not a primary)
xAI's Grok is now in the failover chain for T1 Flow and T1 Max. Not the primary. Here is why that distinction matters, and what actually happens when you type grok-4 into your editor.
Read article ↗Skills, agents, prompts: what actually is the difference
Three words that get used interchangeably in AI tooling, all mean different things. Here is the taxonomy we use at Taskclan and why mixing them up leads to bad product decisions.
Read article ↗How to write a good system prompt
Every AI feature you ship starts with a system prompt. Most are bland, hedgy, and generic in ways that show up in every reply. Here is the pattern we use for the 41 prompts in Achilleon.
Read article ↗Editor rules files: a cross-editor survey
Every AI editor invented its own rules file format. Cursor takes .cursorrules, Windsurf takes .windsurfrules, Zed reads .rules. Here is what actually works in each, from someone who has installed skills into all six.
Read article ↗Introducing Achilleon: the open registry for AI editor skills
One YAML file, seven editor bundles, one npm package. 41 entries across skills, agents, and prompt templates. MIT licensed at github.com/taskclan/achilleon. Contribute a file, ship in the next release.
Read article ↗How much does T1 actually cost
Not the marketing answer, the arithmetic answer. Three real workloads with the tokens, the rates, and the monthly bill for T1 versus Sonnet 5, Opus 4.8, and o1 as head to head comparisons.
Read article ↗The week we shipped the ecosystem
Fourteen slash commands, three sub-participants, and a public gallery. Taskclan Intelligence went from one extension to a browsable catalog in a week. Here is what shipped and how the pieces fit.
Read article ↗Building a full app with Taskclan Intelligence
Most AI apps are a wrapper around one model. Real apps classify, branch, call tools, and know when to escalate. Here is a support triage service in about two hundred lines, built on T1 Core, Flow, and Max.
Read article ↗How the auto router picks a tier
The pitch is simple: you do not pick a model, you describe a task and the router picks the tier that fits. Here is exactly how the router decides, in six signals and seven rules, no black box.
Read article ↗AI in your editor: why participants beat chat tabs
For two years the default answer to adding AI in an editor was a chat tab. That worked. The participant pattern from Slack works better, and it is what Taskclan Intelligence ships with today.
Read article ↗Stop picking AI models by name
Model names go stale in weeks. Cost tradeoffs are hard to reason about. Task to model mapping is guesswork. Tier profiles fix all three, and the router picks per prompt.
Read article ↗The App Spec IR: describe the app instead of coding it
Frameworks make you think in components and state. AI apps have a different shape. The App Spec IR captures what the app is, and Taskclan Studio generates the rest.
Read article ↗What is an AI platform? (and why one system beats a pile of tools)
An AI platform is a single system for building with models, agents, data and creation tools, not a collection of disconnected apps. Here's what that means and why it matters.
Read article ↗How to choose an AI model: fast, adaptive, or deep reasoning
You rarely need the biggest model. Match the model to the task, speed for high-volume work, adaptive orchestration for connected work, and deep reasoning only where quality justifies the cost.
Read article ↗What are AI agents, and how do they use tools?
An AI agent turns a goal into finished work by planning, calling tools, and verifying results. Here's how agents and typed tools actually work, and how to design them well.
Read article ↗Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): how to show up in AI answers
Search is no longer just ten blue links. GEO is how you get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. Here's a practical checklist.
Read article ↗Start building