Articles

Cut your Claude Code bill with houtini-lm, and get a second opinion

We built houtini-lm so Claude Code can stay the orchestrator while other models do the work: a cheaper frontier model, a local model on your own GPU, or a specialist with a skill Claude doesn't have. In today's post we're taking a closer look at what my average Claude Code day costs, what the same work costs elsewhere, and what a second model on the job adds besides the saving.

claude-code · openrouter

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.

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.

What is an MCP server? The Model Context Protocol explained

An MCP server gives an AI assistant like Claude tools and data from outside itself, through one open standard. In today's guide we're taking a closer look at how it works, using the MCP servers we build and use every day at Houtini as the examples, and at what changed in the July 2026 spec.

Claude Code: The Complete Beginner's Guide

In today's guide I'm sharing most of what I know about Claude Code after months of daily use - the bits that work, the bits I got spectacularly wrong, and what I wish someone had told me on day one.

How to Run a Free AI Content Detector Locally

The #1-ranked AI detector is free, runs on your own PC, and never uploads your text - unlike Originality.ai or GPTZero. Here's how to run it, or the tool I built.

The Best MCP Servers for Claude Code (2026)

Claude Code has been my main coding tool for over a year, and the MCP servers around it are what close its gaps - live documentation, your database, production errors, a cheap local model for the grunt work. In today's guide I'm walking through the stack I run every day, with the install order I'd use on a fresh setup.

claude-code · mcp

Best PC for Local AI & LLMs (2026): From First Model to AI Workstation

A PC for local AI is a different purchase from a gaming PC. VRAM decides which models you can run, and a second GPU on a gaming motherboard runs into a PCIe lane limit. Here's what each GPU can run, with speeds measured on my own dual-4090 rig, and what I'd buy at each step.

Claude for Excel: How to Add It, Use It and Check Its Work

I first tested Claude for Excel in its February beta, and this week I ran it again on 20,000 rows of product data made messy on purpose. This guide covers how to add it, the edit setting to check before you start, and why it does its best work one simple step at a time.

Best MCP Servers for Claude Desktop (2026)

Claude Desktop is open all day on my machine, and the MCP servers wired into it are what turn a very good chat window into a control panel for everything I work on. In today's guide I'm walking through the stack I run, grouped by job - SEO, finance, research, browser automation - with my real install order and the ones I'd skip.

mcp · claude-desktop

Working with AI: Using the Gmail MCP 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…

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…

Query Fan-Out MCP for AI Search Optimisation

I built fanout-mcp because AI search doesn't work with keywords - it expands every question into dozens of semantic variants and cites whoever covers them. In today's post I explain Google's query fan-out research, how I adapted it into an MCP server you can run inside Claude, and what it found when I pointed it at my own writing.

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…

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.

Claude Desktop Tutorial: a Beginner's Guide

In today's guide, we're starting from scratch with Claude Desktop, the app where AI stops being a chatbot and starts doing jobs for you. We install it, change a few settings, connect Gmail for an email summary, then cover Projects, context and letting Claude work on files on your own disk without putting anything at risk.

claude-code · claude-desktop

How to connect Google Search Console to Claude with an MCP server

SEO Audit Console is a free MCP server that pulls your Search Console history into a database on your own machine, joins it to a crawl of your site, and lets Claude query both. In today's guide we're taking a closer look at how to set it up in Claude Desktop or Claude Code, run the first sync and crawl, and ask your first SEO questions.

claude-code · mcp

How to Set Up the DataForSEO MCP with Claude Desktop (2026)

In today's guide we're connecting the official DataForSEO MCP (v3) to Claude Desktop: there's a zero-install hosted option, a local setup if you'd rather hold the keys, and a new docs-plus-gateway model worth understanding before you start.

Chrome DevTools MCP: What It Does, and When to Use Something Else

Google's Chrome DevTools MCP gave coding agents a real Chrome to debug in. These days I use Claude's own browser for debugging and design, so here's what the MCP does now, how to install it, and where each of the alternatives fits.