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Field Guides By @davecto

Resources

Guides I've written for founders and people building software. Most are a PDF you can read in one sitting, some are web pages, and every one is free.

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16
Resources On The Shelf
283
Pages Of Actual Advice
$0
Every One Is Free
The Shelf

Everything, At A Glance

Newest first. Click a row for the full entry, read any guide right here on the web, or grab the PDF to keep.

01 Paid SaaS vs. Open Source Thirty tools you're about to pay for, and the six where open source actually wins. Decision Guide · 27pp Read ▶PDF ▼
02 Eleven Businesses On A Decision Model Eleven businesses you could build on a model that only makes decisions. Field Guide · 20pp Read ▶PDF ▼
03 How To Set Up /brag Turn the thing you just shipped into a twenty-second launch video. Setup Guide · 6pp Read ▶PDF ▼
04 Top 11 Skill Repos The most-starred skill repos for Claude Code and Codex, with install commands. Web Guide · Live Page Open ▶
05 Three Tabs, One Command Build a command-line tool over HubSpot, QuickBooks and Gmail, tokens included. Build Guide · 31pp Read ▶PDF ▼
06 You Probably Don't Need The Bigger Plan Ten things to check before you upgrade your AI plan, in the order I'd check them. Field Guide · 14pp Read ▶PDF ▼
07 Point An AI At Your Instagram Three prompts: read your competitors, audit your last twenty posts, fix how your videos end. Prompt Pack · 8pp Read ▶PDF ▼
08 Before You Hit Submit For Review Twelve things to check the night before your first App Store submission. Checklist · 14pp Read ▶PDF ▼
09 Free For Humans, Metered For Machines Eleven businesses in the gap Cloudflare left in its toll booth for AI crawlers. Field Guide · 23pp Read ▶PDF ▼
10 Cheap To Attempt, Expensive To Trust Seven agent businesses that work because checking the answer costs less than producing it. Field Guide · 20pp Read ▶PDF ▼
11 Make It Ask Before It Builds One block you paste above any request so the model interviews you and plans first. Prompt Pack · 6pp Read ▶PDF ▼
12 The AI Enablement Pivot Move the career you have into getting people to actually use the AI they bought. Field Guide · 21pp Read ▶PDF ▼
13 Build An AI Agent Without Code Ten free courses in order, four weekends, and one working agent at the end. Study Guide · 21pp Read ▶PDF ▼
14 The AI Agent Manager Playbook Ninety days and a portfolio into the job companies have mostly forgotten to hire for. Playbook · 34pp Read ▶PDF ▼
15 The Two-Model Playbook Ten ways to put a second model on the problem so it catches what the first one missed. Field Guide · 21pp Read ▶PDF ▼
16 The Anti-Workslop Guide Make sure the AI-assisted work leaving your hands is real work, and what to do when it isn't. Field Guide · 17pp Read ▶PDF ▼
Cover page of Paid SaaS vs. open source: a founder’s decision guide, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 01 · Page 1 Of 27Click To Read
01 · Decision Guide

Paid SaaS vs. Open Source

Start with the name brand’s free tier. If your usage fits under it, use the paid tool and skip self-hosting, because your time costs more than a free plan. Open source wins on day one in only two situations, and this guide names both, tool by tool, with the usage or the bill that should trigger a switch.

2
The Headline Number

The only situations where open source is the right day-one call. Everything else is a threshold you cross later.

6 of 30

Categories where I’d skip the name brand entirely and start on the alternative.

$5–20

The monthly VPS bill behind every “free” self-hosted tool. It’s never the expensive part.

10

Typeform responses per month on the free plan. That’s the shape of a free tier that can’t run a business.

What's Inside
  • The rule. How to read each entry, and the three shapes a free tier takes before it fails you.
  • Build & ship. Purchases, backend, hosting, error tracking, uptime, push. Six entries, and five of them say stay paid.
  • Get found & make content. SEO, social scheduling, AI video, AI voice, screen recording.
  • Sell & convert. Scheduling, forms, e-signatures, invoicing, bookkeeping.
  • Grow & retain. Analytics, email, CRM, support, feedback boards, short links.
  • Run the company. Automation, project management, docs, chat, passwords, design, research, dictation.
  • The cheat sheet. One row per category, the open source pick, and the trigger to switch.
Daves.Take✣
“Don't screw around with the database. Just use Supabase. If you can't afford Supabase's free tier, something has gone wrong.”
From Entry 02 · Backend, Database & Auth
File.InfoPDF
Name
paid-saas-vs-open-source.pdf
Pages
27
Size
840 KB
Added
Sep 30, 2026
Cover page of Eleven businesses you could build on a decision model, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 02 · Page 1 Of 20Click To Read
02 · Field Guide

Eleven Businesses On A Decision Model

Jev doesn’t write for you. You hand it context and a set of options, and it hands back a classification, a score, or a probability. That’s a narrower product than a chatbot, and the narrowness is the entire opportunity. Eleven places I’d look, and four questions that generate more of them than any list.

YES
The Headline Number

The entire useful output of an enormous number of frontier-model calls running in production right now.

1% → all

Sampled review becomes complete review. That change, not the model, is what customers buy.

73%

A probability instead of a verdict. Thresholds are how software acts on uncertainty without a human in every loop.

Browser

Jev-Ultrafast’s second act: decisions that become clicks, on the thousands of sites that never shipped an API.

What's Inside
  • The shape of the opportunity. Two capabilities, four categories, and the one product not to build with this.
  • Seven ideas that use the model differently. Shopping, browser labour, document search, agent safety, marketplace quality, churn, and competitive intelligence.
  • Four more, kept short. Lead scoring, an injection firewall, a model router, and the inbox.
  • Finding your own. Four questions, a one-page spec to fill in before you build anything, and a table of all eleven.
  • Where I’d be skeptical. The three ways this category of business dies, said plainly.
Pull.Quote✣
“If the expensive part of your product is producing the word yes, you don’t have a language problem. You have a pricing problem, and pricing problems are the ones that turn into companies.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
decision-model-business-ideas.pdf
Pages
20
Size
675 KB
Added
Sep 30, 2026
Cover page of How to set up /brag: a one-page guide, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 03 · Page 1 Of 6Click To Read
03 · Setup Guide

How To Set Up /brag

/brag is an open-source Claude Code skill that reads your project’s actual code, writes a storyboard, scores it, renders an MP4, and hands you the caption to post with it. Two commands to install, one word to run. Here’s the setup, then five things worth knowing before your first run.

15–25s
The Headline Number

The hard ceiling. A creative law in the skill, not a suggestion — long enough to land, short enough to autoplay.

7

Tone presets, from polished to chaotic, plus freeform direction that overrides any of them.

4

Files you get back: the plan, the composition, brag.mp4, and share copy written in the video’s tone.

0

Screenshots, URLs or design assets you need to supply. It reads the source.

What's Inside
  • Inspect. It reads your main page, stylesheet, README, routes and data files, and answers nine questions about the product before it plans anything.
  • Plan. It writes brag-output/brag-plan.md — the angle, the hook, the highlights, the punchline, and a scene-by-scene storyboard with durations. This is the file to read.
  • Compose. The storyboard becomes a real composition, with music, sound effects on the moments that move, and a check pass that has to come back clean before anything renders.
  • Deliver. brag.mp4, a poster frame picked from a settled moment and baked in as frame zero, and share-copy.txt.
Tip.03✣
“Argue with the plan, not with the render. Fixing a hook in the plan costs a sentence; fixing it after the render costs the render.”
From Step Three · Getting A Good One
File.InfoPDF
Name
brag-setup-guide.pdf
Pages
6
Size
518 KB
Added
Sep 30, 2026

/brag isn't mine. I have no relationship with the people who make it or with Hyperframes. I just use it.

Top 11 Skill Repos: The most-starred skill repos for Claude Code and Codex, with install commands.
Fig. 04 · davecto.com/skillsClick To Open
04 · Web Guide

Top 11 Skill Repos

The 11 most-starred skill repos for Claude Code and Codex, ranked by GitHub stars. For each one you get what it does, what makes it good, and the exact command to install it. This one's a web page, not a PDF, so the Copy buttons work.

1.28M
The Headline Number

Combined GitHub stars across all eleven repos, as of Sep 29, 2026.

272k

Stars on No.01, Matt Pocock's skills.

$0

What every one of them costs.

3

Ways to install almost anything on the list.

What's Inside
  • The list. All 11 at a glance, with stars relative to No.01.
  • Skills 101. What a skill is, why it's cheap to install, and where it runs.
  • Deep dives. What each repo does, why it made the list, and how to install it.
  • Where to start. Which one to try first, and what to check before you install anything.
Page.InfoWEB
Address
davecto.com/skills
Format
Live Web Page
Added
Sep 29, 2026
Cover page of Three tabs, one command, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 05 · Page 1 Of 31Click To Read
05 · Build Guide

Three Tabs, One Command

How to build a command-line tool that reads the systems your business actually runs on, with the worked example I built against HubSpot, QuickBooks and Gmail, the seven prompts that produce it, and the part everyone gets stuck on: getting the tokens.

~1,400
The Headline Number

Lines of TypeScript in the source. Tests add a few hundred more.

3

Runtime dependencies. Everything else is the standard library.

0

Servers, databases, containers, or things that can be down at 8am.

1

Word you have to remember to use it.

What's Inside
  • What a CLI actually is. Why this shape beats an app for a certain class of problem, and when it doesn’t.
  • The worked example. Three systems, one screen, and the design decisions worth copying.
  • OAuth without the fog. What it is, why it’s awkward for a CLI, and step-by-step token setup for Google and HubSpot.
  • The seven prompts. Copy-ready, with the technical decisions already made so the agent doesn’t improvise.
  • Make it yours. The adaptation prompt, and a list of tools worth building for other jobs.
  • What breaks first. The things I got wrong, and the two features I’d add next.
Pull.Quote✣
“A tiny surface over messy systems is worth more than a big one. One word plus a company name beats a dashboard with forty filters.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
business-cli-tool.pdf
Pages
31
Size
996 KB
Added
Sep 26, 2026
Cover page of You probably don't need the bigger plan, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 06 · Page 1 Of 14Click To Read
06 · Field Guide

You Probably Don't Need The Bigger Plan

Ten things to check before you upgrade, in the order I’d check them. Most people running out of tokens are not doing too much work. They are carrying too much furniture into every single message.

10%
The Headline Number

What a cached input token still costs on the API. Discounted, not free.

5×

Input-price gap between Haiku 4.5 and Opus 5. Same dollar, five times the volume.

Every turn

How often your skills, instructions and tool list get resent. Not once. Every turn.

~30 min

The one-time audit in Part two. It’s the highest-return half hour here.

What's Inside
  • The audit. Three things to measure and cut before you change a single habit. This is where the money is.
  • The habits. Five working patterns that stop refilling the window you just emptied.
  • The two commands. Both underused, one of them almost unknown.
  • What doesn’t work. Including the trick half the internet recommends, and why I don’t.
  • If you’ve done all ten. When a second subscription genuinely beats a bigger one.
Pull.Quote✣
“A fresh session that opens at 40,000 tokens isn’t a fresh session. It’s a bill you agreed to before you started working.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
token-diet.pdf
Pages
14
Size
617 KB
Added
Sep 17, 2026
Cover page of Three prompts for your Instagram account, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 07 · Page 1 Of 8Click To Read
07 · Prompt Pack

Point An AI At Your Instagram

Copy these three prompts into muse.ai once your Instagram account is connected. One reads your competitors, one audits your last twenty posts, one takes apart how your videos end. Paste them as-is.

What's Inside
  • Competitor teardown. Five accounts your size, their outliers, and what the pack does that nothing rewards.
  • Tactical audit. Your last twenty posts ranked by shares and saves, with the hook patterns behind the top five.
  • Ending forensics. The final eight seconds of thirty videos, classified and ranked, then three rewrites.
Pull.Quote✣
“Every claim needs a post and a number attached to it. That single rule is what separates a useful audit from a horoscope.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
instagram-ai-prompts.pdf
Pages
8
Size
305 KB
Added
Sep 17, 2026
Cover page of Read this before you hit Submit for Review, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 08 · Page 1 Of 14Click To Read
08 · Checklist

Before You Hit Submit For Review

Twelve things to check the night before your first App Store submission. Three of them are mine, learned by arguing with Apple. The other nine are the ones that catch everybody else.

One
The Headline Number

Reviewer, one pass, working from whatever is on screen and in your review notes.

90%

Of submissions reviewed within 24 hours, per Apple. Rejections are cheap in money, expensive in days.

5.1.1(v)

The guideline number for account deletion. Memorise it; it’s the one that got me.

iPad

The device they’ll test on that you almost certainly haven’t.

What's Inside
  • The three that got me. Deleting data, the iPad, and explaining permissions like the reader is five.
  • The nine they reject everybody for. Completeness, crashes, privacy policy, metadata, paywalls, UI, login walls, permission priming, and originality.
  • Submit day. A review-notes template you can paste, and a one-page table to run down before you click the button.
Pull.Quote✣
“The reviewer isn’t hostile and isn’t on your team. They’re a stranger with a queue, and everything ambiguous resolves against you.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
app-store-submission-checklist.pdf
Pages
14
Size
609 KB
Added
Sep 17, 2026
Cover page of Free for humans, metered for machines, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 09 · Page 1 Of 23Click To Read
09 · Field Guide

Free For Humans, Metered For Machines

Cloudflare built a toll booth for AI crawlers and left the pricing logic empty on purpose. Eleven businesses that could grow in that gap, what each one actually requires to work, and the specific reason each one might not.

402
The Headline Number

the HTTP code doing the work, unused for nearly thirty years

~20%

of global web traffic sits behind the company running the toll booth

50,000:1

worst reported crawl-to-referral ratio for a major AI bot

11

businesses here, each with the reason it might not work

What's Inside
  • What actually shipped. Separating the live mechanism from the pitch deck around it.
  • The empty hook. Why the pricing layer is the interesting part, and where that argument strains.
  • Sell side. Five businesses aimed at publishers trying to earn from machines.
  • Buy side. Three aimed at the companies that suddenly have a new cost line.
  • Trust and format. Two that only matter if the market gets big enough to cheat.
  • The strange one. A publisher whose actual customer is the bot.
  • What has to be true. Four conditions, and the case against each idea surviving.
  • Signposts and a cheap test. What to watch, and thirty days that beat a business plan.
Pull.Quote✣
“The interesting part isn’t that a toll booth exists. It’s that nobody has decided what anything costs.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
bot-economy.pdf
Pages
23
Size
702 KB
Added
Sep 6, 2026
Cover page of Cheap to attempt, expensive to trust, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 10 · Page 1 Of 20Click To Read
10 · Field Guide

Cheap To Attempt, Expensive To Trust

OpenAI shipped a model that can operate software for forty minutes at a stretch and still fails most of the way through six out of ten professional automations. Seven businesses that work anyway, because in each one checking the answer costs less than producing it. Each also gets the specific reason it might not.

41.4%
The Headline Number

AutomationBench. The success rate every business here has to survive

37 pts

gap between the headline ARC-AGI-3 score and the independent harness’s

2.5×

the direction frontier token prices moved this month. Up.

7

businesses here, each with the reason it might not work

What's Inside
  • What actually shipped. The capability, separated from the launch narrative, with confidence levels attached.
  • The filter. Why the cost of checking the work decides everything downstream of it.
  • Exhaustive search. Three businesses that read everything nobody could afford to read.
  • Operating bad software. Three aimed at the interfaces that will never have an API.
  • The strange one. A service company with no employees and no dashboard.
  • What has to be true. Five conditions, and the one objection I have no answer to.
  • Signposts and a cheap test. What to watch, and thirty days that beat a market map.
Pull.Quote✣
“Every company has work worth doing that nobody does, because sending a human to go and get it costs more than the work returns.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
agent-economy.pdf
Pages
20
Size
668 KB
Added
Sep 6, 2026
Cover page of Make it ask before it builds, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 11 · Page 1 Of 6Click To Read
11 · Prompt Pack

Make It Ask Before It Builds

One block of text you paste above any real request. It forces the model to interview you first, show you its plan, and wait for approval before it writes a word.

6
The Headline Number

steps, run in order, before any drafting happens

10

questions, delivered at once, ranked by consequence

2

places it has to stop and wait for you

3

minutes of answering that saves an hour of rewriting

Pull.Quote✣
“A model never says “I don’t know enough to start yet.” It just starts.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
plan-mode-prompt.pdf
Pages
6
Size
413 KB
Added
Aug 26, 2026
Cover page of The AI enablement pivot, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 12 · Page 1 Of 21Click To Read
12 · Field Guide

The AI Enablement Pivot

How to move a career you already have into the job companies are creating right now: getting real people to actually use the AI they already bought. What the work is, which door you walk in, and the thirty days that make you credible.

4
The Headline Number

doors into the work, depending on where you’re standing now

3

case studies that outweigh any certificate

1

credential actually worth paying for

30

days to a portfolio, a rewritten profile, and a real story

What's Inside
  • What the job actually is. The eight things you’d be hired to do, and the one you can’t fake.
  • Your door. Four lanes in, and the sentence that positions each one.
  • The paper. Rewriting the top third, plus copy you can lift today.
  • The proof. Three projects that do what a certificate can’t.
  • The search. Titles are a mess. Read responsibilities instead.
  • The curriculum. Four things to learn, in this order, mostly free.
  • The month. A week by week plan, and the six ways it stalls.
Pull.Quote✣
“The hard part was never the software. It’s the ninety people who have to change how they work.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
ai-enablement-pivot.pdf
Pages
21
Size
651 KB
Added
Aug 26, 2026
Cover page of The non-coder’s study guide to building AI agents, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 13 · Page 1 Of 21Click To Read
13 · Study Guide

Build An AI Agent Without Code

Ten free courses, in the order that actually works, plus what to build after each one. Four weekends, about twenty five hours, and one small agent at the end that does a real piece of your job.

10
The Headline Number

free resources, sequenced in six stages

6

parts every working agent has

4

weekends, if you want a schedule

$0

to start. Free tiers cover all of it.

What's Inside
  • What you’re actually learning. The six parts, and the one distinction worth arguing about.
  • The ten resources. Why each one is where it is, and what to build when you finish it.
  • Four weekends. A schedule, and the question each one answers.
  • The capstone. One small agent, six components, ten test cases.
  • Where people get stuck. Symptom in, next step out.
Pull.Quote✣
“The hard part was never the code. It is deciding what the agent is allowed to do.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
no-code-ai-agent-study-guide.pdf
Pages
21
Size
679 KB
Added
Aug 18, 2026
Cover page of The AI agent manager playbook, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 14 · Page 1 Of 34Click To Read
14 · Playbook

The AI Agent Manager Playbook

Ninety days, no computer science degree, and a portfolio you can build on your own time. A practical route into the job companies are quietly desperate for and have mostly forgotten to hire.

3x
The Headline Number

more likely to report established ROI where accountability is clear

5x

more likely to report ROI with full visibility into AI operating costs

49%

have delayed or scaled back agent rollouts on cost

35%

have “very clear” rules for when a human overrides AI

What's Inside
  • Why this role exists now. The accountability gap, in numbers, and why agents made it urgent.
  • What the job actually is. Five responsibilities that fit on one page.
  • Your transferable skills. What your current job already taught you, translated.
  • The literacy floor. The eleven concepts you need, and the ones you can skip.
  • The agent charter. Four questions every agent must answer in writing.
  • Governance, override, and risk. Including the human-override playbook nobody has written.
  • Cost, measurement, and ROI. The money skill that is currently a named gap.
  • Security for non-engineers. Seven controls you can specify without writing code.
  • Plus 4 more. The full contents are on page one.
Pull.Quote✣
“An AI agent manager is not the person who builds the agent. It is the person who makes the agent trustworthy enough to run inside a real business.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
ai-agent-manager-playbook.pdf
Pages
34
Size
1024 KB
Added
Aug 16, 2026
Cover page of The two-model playbook, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 15 · Page 1 Of 21Click To Read
15 · Field Guide

The Two-Model Playbook

Ten ways to put two AI models on the same problem so the second one catches what the first one missed. Why each works, and the one rule that decides whether you get better answers or just more expensive ones.

10
The Headline Number

pairings worth knowing, in four families

4

distinct reasons a second pass helps at all

1

rule that decides whether any of them work

0

extra subscriptions required. A second window counts.

What's Inside
  • Why it works. Four reasons, and the rule that decides if any of them apply.
  • The ten pairings. What each is for, how to set it up, how it fails.
  • Running it. The handoff, seven failure modes, and when one model is plenty.
  • The drop-in prompts. Six you can paste today.
  • The lookup table. Symptom in, pattern out.
Pull.Quote✣
“The second model isn’t there to be smarter. It’s there to be uncommitted.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
two-model-playbook.pdf
Pages
21
Size
652 KB
Added
Aug 11, 2026
Cover page of The anti-workslop guide, by Dave Brown.
Fig. 16 · Page 1 Of 17Click To Read
16 · Field Guide

The Anti-Workslop Guide

How to make sure the AI-assisted work leaving your hands is real work. And what to do, without starting a fight, when someone hands you the other kind.

40%
The Headline Number

of full-time employees received workslop in the past month

1h 56m

average time lost dealing with a single instance

$9M

estimated annual cost per 10,000 employees

32%

don’t want to work with the sender again

What's Inside
  • Don’t be the source. Three disciplines that keep your own output honest.
  • Don’t be the victim. Five ways to push back that don’t cost you the relationship.
  • The slop loop. What happens when two AIs argue through two people.
  • If you run a team. Seven changes that actually move the number.
  • The drop-in standard. A team norm you can paste into a channel today.
Pull.Quote✣
“AI produces drafts. People produce work. You are not finished until the draft is something you can stand behind in a room.”
From The Guide
File.InfoPDF
Name
anti-workslop-guide.pdf
Pages
17
Size
669 KB
Added
Aug 11, 2026
What's Next

More On The Way

I add a guide here whenever I finish writing one. Same deal every time: free, no email, readable on the web or as a PDF.

Got A Topic?

If there's a decision you keep getting stuck on, email hi@davecto.com. The best guides start as someone else's question.

Queue.Log~/resources

$ ls ~/resources | wc -l
      16
$ ls -t ~/resources | head -3
paid-saas-vs-open-source.pdf        27pp
decision-model-business-ideas.pdf   20pp
brag-setup-guide.pdf                6pp
next-guide.pdf                      writing