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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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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Claude Desktop System Requirements: Windows & macOS
Have you found yourself becoming a heavy AI user? For Claude Desktop, what hardware matters, what doesn't, and where do Anthropic's official specs look a bit optimistic? In this article: Official Requirements | Windows vs macOS |…
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Best GPUs for Running Local LLMs: Buyer's Guide 2026
I've been running various LLMs on my own hardware for a while now and, without fail, the question I see asked the most (especially on Reddit) is "what GPU should I buy?" The rules for buying a GPU for AI are nothing like the rules for…
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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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LM Studio Settings Explained: Developer Mode, Hardware Detection & Advanced Config (2026)
How does anyone end up running their own AI models locally? For me, it started because of a deep interest in GPUs and powerful computers. I've got a machine on my network called "hopper" with six NVIDIA GPUs and 256GB of RAM, and I'd been…
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Cut Your Claude Code Token Use by Offloading Work to Cheaper Models with Houtini-LM
I built houtini-lm for people worried that their Anthropic bill might be getting out of hand. I'd leave Claude Code running overnight on big refactors, wake up, and wince at the token count. A huge chunk of that spend was going on tasks…
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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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The Best MCP Servers for Claude Code
Claude Code has been my main coding tool since about October last year. It's brilliant at reading codebases, solid at refactoring, and highly reliable as an overnight test and iterate copilot. But on its own it's partially blind - no web…
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Best PCs for Local AI: GPUs, Mini PCs & Builds Tested
VRAM decides everything when running local AI. Tested Corsair VENGEANCE builds from $2,999-$6,999, the RTX 5080 trap, and which GPU tier runs which models.
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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 in Excel: First Impressions from a Real Data Audit
I'm very bullish on the importance of implementing AI tool use in the workplace, and it looks like Anthropic agrees. Anthropic have announced their very own plugin for Excel and today, I've had the opportunity to test it on a real data…
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Best MCP Servers for Claude Desktop (2026)
I spend most of my working day in Claude Desktop. Research, writing, data analysis, managing apps I've built - it's all in there. And when you pair it with the right extensions, honestly, it's astonishing what you can get done. While…
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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: Give Claude Full Control of Your Computer (Setup Guide)
When I discovered Desktop Commander, it quickly become the everything of how I work with Claude. Put simply, this MCP solves a specific, annoying problem: Claude can tell you what to do, but without access to your filesystem, that's all it…
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Claude Desktop Makes a Brilliant Coding Assistant - Here's How to Set It Up
Everyone says if you want AI coding help, you use Cursor. Or Cline. Or GitHub Copilot. Basically anything that hooks into your IDE with inline autocomplete and tab-completion magic. Claude Desktop? That's for chat, not code. I respectfully…
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Claude Desktop: Features, Setup & Requirements
In my work, I live two lives. First, I'm a web worker; I roll out websites, advise on search, or consult and help my clients come up with innovative app ideas. The second? I've been working on ways to make AI use influence productivity…
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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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