Articles
Write-ups from the work. MCP servers, AI workflows, content engineering, search, and the occasional tangent. Most of these come from problems I hit on real engagements, written up so the next person does not have to figure it out from scratch.
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· local-llm · gpuBest GPUs for Running Local LLMs (2026): Memory Bandwidth, VRAM and the Cards Worth Buying
What to buy in 2026 for running local LLMs seriously. Why memory bandwidth matters more than FLOPS, how much VRAM each model tier needs, and the five GPUs worth your money - from the used 3090 floor to the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell 96GB workstation tier.
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· mcp · system-requirementsClaude Desktop System Requirements: Windows, macOS, Linux (2026)
What you need to run Claude Desktop in 2026, after Cowork shipped, the Connectors marketplace landed, and the Opus 4.8 / Sonnet 4.6 generation took over. Anthropic's official specs, what real machines need, and where the install falls over.
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· claude-code · cliClaude Code System Requirements: Mac, Windows, Linux (2026)
What you need to install and run Claude Code on Mac, Windows and Linux in 2026. Anthropic's official spec, what real-world setups end up using, where the install falls over, and the practitioner gotchas the most popular tutorials don't cover.
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· strategy · claude-codeAI for the CFO: variable cost, vendor sprawl, and the playbook that ends the surprise bill
Uber reportedly provisioned 5,000 engineers with Claude Code in December 2025. By April 2026 it had burned the entire annual AI budget in four months. Variable cost is the new shape of the AI line item, and the CFOs who are getting it under control are running the same four-lever playbook. Here is what is on each lever, which platforms are credible, and what to ship in the next ninety days.
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· Claude · strategyAI hallucination, and the boring discipline that stops it being a problem
You have read about lawyers citing made-up cases and chatbots inventing refund policies. The fix is not a new platform or a clever prompt. It is the most boring discipline in software: read what came out and check the bits that matter against a second source. Here is what hallucination is, how we run a Houtini-grade check on every claim, and what would change if your team did the same.
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· Claude · strategyWhat is RAG, and what could it do in your company?
Your AI confidently answers questions about your business with public-internet knowledge. RAG is the architecture that gets your actual contracts, customer list and operating playbook into the conversation, with citations. Here is what it is, where it sits next to long context and MCP, and what it changes if you sponsor the work this quarter.
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The Bitcoin Spiral: How I Built a Live AI-Narrated Dashboard on GitHub Pages
I spent an afternoon building a live Bitcoin dashboard on GitHub Pages with no backend, no paid API key, and a frontier model writing the verdict at the top of the page every six hours. Here's how it works, what it cost (nothing), how to stop the model inventing numbers, and where the architecture goes next when Chrome ships in-browser inference.
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· Claude · claude-codeA beginner's guide to Claude hooks
Claude Code hooks are small scripts that fire automatically at specific moments in a coding session. They give you deterministic control where CLAUDE.md instructions only get probabilistic compliance. This beginner's guide covers what hooks do, the five events you need to know, the exit-code gotcha that catches almost everyone, and the community projects worth installing before you write your own.
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What Are AI Agents? The Plain-English Explanation
An early-user's view of AI agents. Where they fit relative to chat and MCPs, what counts as agentic, and the simplest first agent to build inside Claude Code.
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Claude Code API Key Security: A Guide to Token Hygiene
The simplest possible setup that keeps your production tokens out of AI chat windows. 1Password CLI, op run, and the conversational discipline that makes the rest of it work.
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· ClaudeAI for the Managing Director and CEO - What You Need to Know
If you back your team to identify and ship the work that AI can take off them, you've cleared the biggest barrier to making AI adoption in your company real.
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Agentic Interoperability for Website Owners: AI User Experience (AI UX)
I've been keeping a close eye on the emerging subject of "agentic interoperability" across all my recent build projects. In layman's terms, that's the ability for AI agents to do things for you on your behalf - particularly inside SaaS…
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Implementing WebMCP on a Recruitment Website
Thinking about what, exactly, the future of a website "looks" like in the agentic era is a challenging proposition. It might be that in most cases, our future viewers/readers/customers can do everything, from their chatbot of preference…
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How to Set Up a Claude Code Project (And What Goes Where)
The .claude folder is the control centre for how Claude Code behaves in your project. Here's what goes in it, what each file does, and the step-by-step setup I use for every new project.
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Swapping the Engine: How to Run Claude Code on Local Silicon for Zero Pennies
Claude Code's real power isn't the Anthropic model sitting behind it, it's the agentic : the file-system access, the tool use, the way it chains tasks together without you babysitting every step. I figured this out the expensive way. I ran…
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A Beginner's Guide to Claude Computer Use
I've been letting Claude control my mouse and keyboard on and off to test this feature for a little while, and the honest answer is that it's simultaneously the most impressive and most frustrating AI feature I've used. It can navigate…
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A Beginner's Guide to AI Mini PCs - Do You Need a DGX Spark?
I've been running a local LLM on a variety of bootstrapped bit of hardward, water-cooled 3090's and an LLM server I call hopper full of older Ada spec GPUs. When NVIDIA, Corsair, et al. all started shipping these tiny purpose-built AI…
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Content Marketing Ideas: What It Is, How I Built It, and Why I Use It Every Day
Content Marketing Ideas is the tool I've built to relcaim the massive amount of time I have to spend monitoring my sources for announcementsm ,ew products, release - whatever. The Problem with Content Research in 2026 Most front line…
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Are Claude Skills Just an Alternative to Reading a Book or is there more than that?
I've too long treating skills like magic incantations of a topic that really, I don't fully understand. I strated out not really thinking about skills or embracing them. I still don't, fully, becuase most of what I do is command line…
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Using a Local LLM to Audit Your Codebase - What Qwen3 Coder Next Catches (and Misses)
I run a local copy of Qwen3 Coder Next on a machine under my desk. It pinned down a race condition in my production code that I'd missed. It also told me, with complete confidence, that crypto.randomUUID() doesn't work in Cloudflare…
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How to Make SVGs with Claude and Gemini MCP
SVG is having a moment. Over 63% of websites use it, developers are obsessed with keeping files lean and human-readable, and the community has turned against bloated AI-generated "node soup" that looks fine but falls apart the moment you…
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How to Make Images with Claude and (our) Gemini MCP
My latest version of @houtini/gemini-mcp (Gemini MCP) now generates images, video, SVG and html mockups in the Claude Desktop UI with the latest version of MCP apps. But - in case you missed, you can generate images, svgs and video from…
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Yet Another Memory MCP? That's Not the Memory You're Looking For
I was considering building my own memory system for Claude Code after some early, failed affairs with memory MCPs. In therapy we're encouraged to think about how we think. A discussion about metacognition in a completely unrelated world…
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The Best MCPs for Content Marketing (Research, Publish, Measure)
Most front line content marketing workflow follows the same loop. Find something worth writing about, dig into what's already ranking on your site, update or write it, run it through SEO checks, shove it into WordPress, then wait to see if…
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· claude-code · local-llmLM Studio Setup Guide 2026: Install, First Model & Settings
Install LM Studio on Windows or Mac in under 10 minutes, download your first model, and tune the hardware settings (developer mode, GPU offload, context length, multi-GPU tensor parallelism) for the rig you've got. Updated for LM Studio 0.4.16.
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· claude-code · openrouterHow I Cut My Claude Code Token Spend with Houtini LM (Architect, Drafter, QA)
Claude as the architect. A cheap local model as the drafter. Claude QAs everything. The token bill drops as a side-effect of using each model for what it does best. Here is how I run it on my own rig.
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What Skills Are AI Companies Hiring For, and What Do the Jobs Tell Us About Their Strategy?
I pointed YubHub at 7,200+ job listings across the major AI labs and the hiring patterns reveal six completely different strategic bets. Anthropic is all-in on research. OpenAI reads like an enterprise SaaS company. xAI is hiring domain experts to teach Grok finance. Here's what the data shows.
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How to Create LinkedIn Carousel Slides with Gemini and Claude
A developer workflow for turning blog posts into LinkedIn carousel slides using Gemini SVG generation, Puppeteer PDF conversion, and a four-line Python merge script. No Canva, no SaaS tools.
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What Is an MCP Server? And Why It Matters for AI Tool Use
MCP servers turn Claude Desktop from a chat window into a workspace where applications actually run. Here's what Model Context Protocol is, how it works, and why 97 million monthly SDK downloads suggest this isn't just hype.
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How to Improve Your AI Prototype Designs with Skills, Prompts and Gemini
I build a lot of single-file HTML prototypes with Claude Code. They work, but they all end up looking the same. I tested three approaches to fix this - Claude Skills, manual prompt engineering, and Gemini MCP feedback.
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Claude Code: The Complete Beginner's Guide
I've been running Claude Code every day for the last few months. MCP servers, articles across three sites, Python scripts, content workflows that run from research straight through to WordPress upload. Nothing's changed how I work this…
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How to Run Free AI Text Detection Locally with Python and an NVIDIA GPU
I've been curious about AI content detection for a while. Not how to beat it - but how it works under the hood. Did you know "the best" model in the world is completely free, runs on any PC, and nobody seems to know about it? Everyone's…
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· claude-code · mcpThe Best MCP Servers for Claude Code (2026)
The MCP servers I run in Claude Code every day. Rebuilt for the agentic-coding-as-default era - native /agents, the Desktop/Code binary merger, and the local-model offload pattern that keeps long sessions from burning your Anthropic quota.
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Best PCs for Local AI 2026: 21 Tested Builds, £200 to £8K
VRAM decides everything when running local AI. I've tested 21 PCs across six tiers - from a £200 RTX 3060 entry build to the £8,499 Mac Studio M3 Ultra - showing exactly which GPU runs which model size and at what tokens per second.
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Better Search Console: Analyse Your Google Search Console Data with Interactive Dashboards
Every MCP server that connects to Google Search Console has the same fundamental limitation. The API returns a maximum of 1,000 rows per request. One or two requests in, and you've consumed your context window. This problem is quite…
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Claude for Excel: From Beta First-Impressions to GA - What Works, What Still Bites, and a Workbook You Can Steal
Claude for Excel went GA on May 7, 2026 as part of the Claude for Microsoft 365 suite. The Beta-era chat-history problem is fixed, the permission-edits issue still bites by default, and Microsoft 365 Copilot now embeds Claude as a model choice. Three workflows from a real PIM data audit, plus a downloadable workbook + prompt library you can fork.
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· mcp · claude-desktopBest MCP Servers for Claude Desktop (2026)
The MCP servers I run in Claude Desktop every day. The new Customize panel walkthrough, the SEO and finance verticals I lean on, the Gemini MCP I built for grounded second opinions, and the local-models offload pattern I use to keep long sessions affordable.
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How will AI Affect Content Marketing in 2026?
Not all that long ago, I found myself trying to find an answer to a question about the PSU I might need for a PC accessory. I was alarmed to see that my site wasn’t in the results for the query, because that information wasn’t featured in…
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Building a Free, Open Source SEO Crawler for LLM Consumption
I wanted to build on my experience working with the MCP protocol SDK to see just how far we can extend an AI assistant's capabilities. I decided that I'd quite like to build a crawler to check my site's "technical SEO" health and came…
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Generate a Tone of Voice Guide with Voice Analyser MCP
While AI will never replace human creativity, it can certainly help with productivity. Today I'm sharing my Voice Analyser MCP - an experimental tone of voice guideline generator that runs from a website's XML sitemap. The point of this…
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Case Study: Automating XML Jobs feeds with AI
Update: in this post I mentioned I'm working on a project that produces job xml feeds called YubHub - we're now live and you can find out more about how it works here. A big problem for start-up or growth-focused jobs board sites is…
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AI SEO - A Tool to Help You Improve Your Content for AI Search
Not that long ago, I was searching for an answer to a question about a USB device and whether it needed a separate PSU. This happened to be a topic very close to my heart, and owning a handful of affiliate content sites on the topic, this…
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How to Make Charts and Data Visualisation with the Data Commons MCP
This morning I found myself tasked with analysing a dataset for a client. While the analysis will be via SEMrush data exports and Python scripts to format the data I need, I was slightly procrastinating at the thought of having to draw…
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Content Marketing Using AI: the Right Way
You can't get away with AI copy if you want your SEO performance to be reliable. My conclusion: AI should be used to enhance human productivity - it can't replace human creativity. But, I do think we can use AI to build interesting…
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Working with AI: Using Gmail in Claude
I've got a client over in Australia who are *just* warming up after a lengthy Christmas break. It's an SAP B1 integration with Shopify and Onetimpim - many moving parts! My client emailed this morning asking for a catch-up meeting and…
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RAG Without RAG: How to Make a Content Research Index for Claude
This weekend's project started with a simple need: collect the transcripts from around 20 YouTube videos from my client's Youtube channel, for a research corpus. The goal was to accurately use the Youtube data to reference in the content…
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Automating Tax Receipt Downloads with Gmail API and Docling
Featured image: Docling analysing 200+ pdfs and converting to simple markdown How does anyone keep track of business expenses for UK self-assessment? For me, this started because I run multiple projects - SimRacingCockpit, this site…
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Create an XML Feed with Google Sheets
I recently had the challenge of facilitating regularly scraped data into an XML feed. In the past, I've devised all sorts of ways to scrape, and prepare data, for example, for retailer and affiliate feeds. So, if you need to be able to…
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Query Fan-Out MCP for AI Search Optimisation
I've been building a group of content optimisation tools for the past six months (some availabe on houtini's github, some coming soon). It's really clear that traditional keyword research is now quite broken and outdated for AI search. Not…
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AI in Finance: Using "Financial Modeling Prep" MCP for Real-Time Market Data in Claude
For fun, I thought I'd play with an MCP server for financial data, but getting it working in Claude as an MCP turned out not to be particularly straightforward. Not because the Financial Modeling Prep API is complex, not the MCP server I…
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How to Use Firecrawl in Claude Desktop
I've spent the past few months building Yubhub (launch coming soon), a job aggregator that feeds our Motorsport jobs site, fluidjobs.com. The scraper needs to pull job listings from career sites across Formula 1, automotive engineering…
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Desktop Commander MCP: Give Claude Full Control of Your Computer (2026)
Desktop Commander is the MCP that gives Claude full read-write access to your computer - files, terminal, code. The setup guide that's missing from the docs, plus the gotchas that catch people on day one.
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· claude-code · claude-desktopGetting Started with Claude: a Beginner's Guide
If you've decided to try Claude, the first hour can be confusing - there's the browser, the Desktop app, Cowork on the left sidebar, Claude Code in a tab next to it. Here's how all of that fits together and what to do first, from someone who lives in it every day.
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The Rinse / Repeat Technique in Efficient LLM Context Window Use
I've found lengthy prompt threads cumbersome, particularly in Sonnet 4.5 , where, for some reason Claude absolutely loves to create lengthy summary documents and then, a summary of the summary. This is all incredibly content hogging stuff…
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How to Set Up Claude Desktop with Google Search Console MCP
Claude Desktop's ability to support access to API services using Model Context Protocol (MCP) is impressive stuff. And yes, that means you can get Claude connected to the Search Console API and query it to answer your questions. Better…
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GEO Analyser: Analyse Your Content for Generative Engine Optimisation
I've been watching AI search traffic for the past year, and it's become impossible to ignore. Not because traditional Google is dead - it's not - but because ChatGPT referrals jumped from 14,500 visits per month in early 2024 to over…
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How to Setup the DataForSEO MCP with Claude Desktop
DataForSEO is an API service that gives you programmatic access to the type of SEO data you'd normally have to click through tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to access. Data like search engine listings, LLM visibility, keyword volumes…
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Chrome DevTools MCP: AI-Powered Website Debugging
Learn how Chrome DevTools MCP transforms website debugging from manual detective work into AI-powered analysis. Get expert-level insights on Core Web Vitals, SEO issues, and performance optimization in minutes instead of hours.
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How to Add an MCP Server to Claude Desktop
For almost all of us, the concept of adding an MCP to your AI assistant is completely new. This is ok, if you're reading this, I think you've come to the right place. I'm going to quickly and simply explain how to add an MCP server to…
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Gemini MCP for Claude Desktop
While this might not appear to be my first post on Houtini, it is a particualrly special one. I've had Houtini-LM live for around 3 weeks, built a website, written the user guide, so all in all I've had a very productive time. But, now the…
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