Notes from the build log.
Short-form writing on the web, local AI, and running a small software studio. Not a content-marketing machine. Just things we want to share.
Your customers are asking AI about you. Is your website ready to be recommended?
Google's AI search has over a billion users, ChatGPT answers buying questions daily, and Apple's new Siri runs on Gemini. People increasingly ask an assistant 'who should I hire for this' and get one synthesized answer. Here's how to make sure your business is in that answer, and why it rewards the same fundamentals as a genuinely good website.
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The answer-engine optimization checklist: 12 things that decide whether AI recommends your business
A practical, no-fluff checklist for showing up when a customer asks ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, or the new Gemini-powered Siri about your line of work. Twelve concrete items, why each one matters, and how to check it. A companion to our guide on making your site AI-readable.
Read →Anthropic just shipped Claude Fable 5. What it means for a small business.
Anthropic's most powerful public model is here, and the benchmarks are real: a 50-million-line code migration in a day, state-of-the-art vision and coding. But it costs $10/$50 per million tokens. Here's the honest read for a small business, where the frontier model is rarely the one you should be paying for.
Read →Apple put Google's Gemini inside Siri. What WWDC 2026 means if you run a business.
The headline from Apple's WWDC 2026 keynote isn't a feature; it's a partnership. The new Siri is powered by Google's Gemini. The shift is smaller than the hype, but it matters in one direction. Here's what to take from it, and what to ignore.
Read →Computex 2026 was all about 'AI PCs.' Should your small business buy one?
Taipei spent a week selling on-device AI: NVIDIA's RTX Spark, Intel's Arc G3 and Nova Lake tease, AMD's new X3D chips, a wall of 'AI laptops.' Here's the read for an owner deciding whether to refresh hardware in 2026, and why the memory shortage matters more than the AI badge.
Read →NVIDIA's two 'Sparks': the DGX Spark and the new RTX Spark, explained
NVIDIA now has two 'Spark' machines, and people keep mixing them up. The DGX Spark is a shipping $4,000 AI-developer box; the RTX Spark, announced at Computex 2026, is a Windows-on-Arm consumer platform landing this fall. Here's what each one is, how they compare to an RTX 5090, Mac Studio, and Strix Halo, and whether either makes you more productive.
Read →What AODA actually requires of your Ontario business website in 2026
Most 'your site must be AODA compliant or you'll be fined' marketing is misleading for small businesses. Here's what the law actually says, who it applies to, and why accessibility is still worth doing when it doesn't legally compel you.
Read →What the delivery apps actually cost a Toronto restaurant
Uber Eats, DoorDash, and SkipTheDishes take 20% to 30% of every delivery order. Here's the honest math on when your own online ordering pays for itself, and when the apps are still worth the cut.
Read →Local SEO for a Toronto small business in 2026: what actually moves the map pack
Most 'local SEO packages' are filler. Here's what actually gets a GTA small business into Google's local results, and how much of it you can do yourself for free.
Read →Online booking: when to buy off the shelf, when to build your own
Calendly, Square, and Jane cover most booking needs for a few dollars a month. Here's the short list of situations where a small business actually outgrows them and a custom build starts to pay off.
Read →Why a laptop RTX 5090 isn't a desktop RTX 5090
Same sticker, different chip. The mobile RTX 5090 has roughly half the cores, less memory, and a third of the power budget of the desktop card, and the 100Wh battery rule means it throttles further unplugged. A plain-English guide to reading GPU specs before you spend.
Read →Shopify or a custom storefront? A straight answer for Toronto retailers in 2026
Shopify is the right call for most small stores, and we will tell you so. Here is the short list of reasons a Toronto business actually outgrows it and a custom build starts to pay off.
Read →Google I/O 2026, translated for small business owners
Google's I/O 2026 keynote was three hours of AI. Most of it won't touch a small business this week. But three things will: dramatically cheaper capable models, AI Mode search crossing a billion users, and agentic shopping. Here's the signal, and what to do about it.
Read →What we build for Ontario clinics around medical billing
OHIP claims get rejected, uninsured-services revenue leaks out, and EMR billing modules only do part of the job. A practical read on what custom development actually adds, and where we slot in for clinics that need more than their EMR.
Read →PHIPA-compliant AI for Ontario clinics: a build checklist
What it actually takes to deploy AI inside an Ontario healthcare practice without violating PHIPA. A practical checklist for clinic operators and the developers they hire.
Read →The real total cost of running your own LLM in 2026
GPU sticker prices are only one line on the invoice. A breakdown of every cost center for self-hosted inference, with current 2026 numbers, so you can decide whether the math works for your use case.
Read →What a custom small business website actually costs in Toronto, 2026
Most agencies will not give you a number until you've sat through a sales call. Here's how we think about pricing: what the variables are, what the brackets look like, and what you should never pay for.
Read →Astro vs Next.js vs WordPress for a small business in 2026
Three of the most common frameworks we get asked to compare. A direct read on which one fits your business, written for owners, not developers.
Read →Buying laptops and workstations in 2026, when memory is the expensive part
Between the RAM and NAND crunch and OEM price hikes, this is a genuinely bad year to buy computers. Some of you have to anyway. Here's how to spend sensibly, where the money actually goes, and why the part everyone worries about isn't the part that got expensive.
Read →Back-to-back Linux kernel CVEs, and why a small shop still needs a patch cadence
Copy Fail one week, Dirty Frag the next, the sudo flaws last year. The Linux kernel keeps leaking privilege-escalation bugs. Here's the honest read on what matters and the unglamorous routine that handles it.
Read →AI coding assistants, one year in
A studio that ships code every day takes an honest accounting of what AI coding tools changed, what they didn't, and what it means if you're paying for them, or paying a shop that uses them.
Read →Leaving Windows 10 in the middle of a hardware shortage
Windows 10 hit end of support on October 14, 2025. A lot of small businesses still haven't moved, partly because the timing collides with the worst hardware market in years. Here's the honest set of options.
Read →The March 2026 core update, read honestly
Google's March 2026 core update finished rolling out on April 8. Here's what actually changed, who got hit, and the short list of things worth doing if your rankings moved.
Read →Notes from upgrading this site to Astro 6
Astro 6 shipped on March 10. We upgraded aurabyt.com a few weeks later. Here's what was painless, what wasn't, and whether it's worth the afternoon.
Read →INP is the metric that actually matters now
Interaction to Next Paint has been the Core Web Vitals metric quietly tanking small business sites since 2024. Here's what it is, how to measure it, and the three things that fix it.
Read →The actual break-even point for running LLMs yourself
Cloud APIs are cheap at small volume and expensive at large volume. Here's the rough math on where self-hosting starts to pay off, what it actually costs, and the common mistakes.
Read →What it actually costs to run AI on your own hardware
A plain-English breakdown of the hardware, GPU, memory, and cloud costs involved in running AI inference, for operators who want a number, not a whitepaper.
Read →SSDs got expensive too, and for the same reason as RAM
The 2026 memory crunch isn't just DRAM. NAND flash, the chips inside SSDs, has roughly doubled in price, with 2026 production already sold out. Here's what's going on and what to do about it.
Read →Why RAM prices roughly doubled in 2026
Memory prices have moved sharply in 2026 because of AI datacenter demand. Here's what's happening, who's affected, and how long it's likely to last.
Read →Where AI development sits in 2026
An honest read on where AI development is in 2026: what's actually in production, what's still vaporware, and what it means for the kind of businesses we build software for.
Read →Building Stattraq: a profitability calculator for GTA gig drivers
We built a free calculator that shows rideshare and delivery drivers their true take-home per hour after fuel, depreciation, insurance, CPP, and taxes. A note on why and how.
Read →What's wrong with most small business websites
A direct look at why so many small business websites are slow and generic, what's different about sites built on modern frameworks, and when the cost is actually justified.
Read →When local AI deployment is the right answer
There are specific situations where sending data to a cloud AI provider isn't viable. Here's when local deployment is worth the extra work and when it isn't.
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