Jonathan Milton has worked in healthcare operations for most of his career, wrestling with gnarly problems, like how to fill nursing shortages without relying too much on temp agencies. In this episode, we talk about how he turned his hard-won expertise into useful tools—like an online calculator that exposes the fully loaded cost of staffing, and a game to coach future health care execs on how to solve the human problems well. We dig into how removing the technical friction of building software lets someone like Jon—a domain expert, not a programmer—go from idea to working tool in an evening.

Jim Hanas spent his career in publishing—most recently as VP of Marketing at HarperCollins—but he hadn't been "under the hood" of technology in twenty years. Then a couple of friends got him "Claude-pilled", and within weeks he'd launched smallpressinsights.com, a dashboard that tracks the performance of small press books. In this conversation we get into his three principles for building (slow, thoughtful, clear), his "ocean and lenses" metaphor for handling data, and how he runs Claude Cowork as a PM that writes tickets for Claude Code to implement.

Links:

• Jim's app: https://smallpressinsights.com/
• Jim's Substack: https://www.loureedsnephew.com/
• The how-to Jim mentioned for getting started with Claude Code: https://promptedbyeric.substack.com/p/claude-cowork-might-be-the-most-consequential

Today's guest is Mark Wochner: acoustic engineer, DIY aficionado, and maker of great cocktails. He got into AI app-building to revive a project he'd dreamed up called Historicast (look up weather in the past!) and got hooked enough to make himself a whole slew of other fun apps. In this episode, we talk about building software in hotel rooms across three continents, why he wants four weather forecasts instead of one, and why his one-person company finally got the part-time hire it needed (hint: it's Claude). Mark has used AI coding agents to make barcode apps and pantry databases, and in this conversation, we talk about why building software for an audience of one might be the most freeing thing you can do.

Links:

• Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-wochner-9a8a9448
• Mark's company, AdBm Technologies: https://adbmtech.com/
• Historicast on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/historicast/id6761114831