Happy Monday All!

Four pieces this week, and two of them involve AI agents: one about getting more out of Claude Code's limits and one about agents spending money for you.

Say "Hi" to Claude Code for Better Alignment

Claude Code's five-hour window starts with your first message, so if I start at 9 AM my reset lands around 2 PM, right in the middle of deep work. I now use a scheduled prompt to say "hi" before I sit down, which moves the reset to lunch. You can make that prompt do real work too, like ranking my open tasks, so it isn't a wasted message.

Agentic Commerce with Paul Conroy

I talked with Paul Conroy from Square1 about AI agents that make purchases on a user's behalf. We covered Stripe's shared payment tokens for keeping an agent inside a budget and the Machine Payments Protocol, which uses HTTP 402 Payment Required in API middleware to charge per request. Paul also built the laravel-mpp package and a PayForGoals.com demo you can poke at.

PHP Runs in the Strangest Places

My column in the October issue of php[architect] starts with a confession: I still picture PHP as the "P" in LAMP, sitting on a Linux box behind Apache. Over the last few years PHP has moved well past that setup, and I keep finding it in places I never expected. The full column is in the PHP Battlesnakes issue.

How to Repurpose a Podcast Episode Into a Week of Content

Over on The Steady Pack I laid out the repurposing loop I use so I don't have to decide what to make every week. Pick three strong moments, cut two or three captioned vertical clips, build an audiogram and a quote card from templates, and send a short newsletter. Spread those across seven days and one recording fills the week.

See you next Monday.