Okay, I Have to Admit -- This One Got Me "It pays you when people DON'T buy." I read that sentence and just... sat with it for a second. Astro read it over my shoulder -- or at least pretended to, because he was definitely more interested in sitting on my keyboard -- and even he seemed intrigued. Blake texted me about this one at approximately 10pm on a Tuesday. "Annie. ANNIE. It ...

Your AI is not actually listening to you. I know. You think it is. It responds instantly, it uses your words back at you, it sounds incredibly confident -- and then somewhere around step four of a six-step task, it just... goes somewhere else. It starts solving a problem you didn't ask it to solve. It prioritizes something it decided was important. It confidently produces something that is absolutely, definitively not ...

A Lab Report on ThriveCart and ConvertBoxJerry Somerfield and David Kaplan walked into my lab this week and I have not stopped thinking about this conversation since.Jerry got into ThriveCart back when it was still in beta. David found it later, called it "not how software works," looked at it himself, and has been quietly kicking himself ever since. I have been using it for my own product delivery.We recorded ...

I said I'd follow up. Here's the follow up.If you listened to Episode 005 (listen here), you heard David absolutely lose his mind about Claude burning through credits mid-workflow and then asking for more money to finish the job. I also said I'd post a full breakdown once I had actual answers. So here we are.Here's what's actually going on.The short version: it's real, it's widespread, and Anthropic knows.This isn't ...

Let me tell you about my friend Diana's Thursday.Diana -- one of my best friends who is also one of our guest contributors and, for the record, someone who actually knows what she's doing -- sat down to build a multi-location service workflow for her technicians. Not a novel request. Not some experimental agentic fever dream. A workflow. Something she has built with Claude before, multiple times, with great results.Except ...

Two AIs Walk Into a Bar By Annie Rhodes | AI Alchemy with Annie Here's the thing about reviewing AI tools -- the more you use them, the more you realize a single review barely scratches the surface. I covered ChatGPT and Claude head-to-head in my last Lab Report, and everything I said stands. But I had some very interesting conversations with soime of my friends and colleagues who use them ...

Design tool gets a brain upgrade. Astro approves of the color palette.Confession time.Before I started testing AI tools professionally — and yes, I am using the word "professionally" while wearing a lab coat covered in coffee stains and cat hair— I was a Canva user. Regular, non-AI Canva. The kind where you drag things around and hope they look good and occasionally accidentally delete three hours of work and have ...

You don't need to spend a dime to find out if this tool belongs in your workflow. Here's how to start.If you read my ElevenLabs Lab Report, you already know I'm a fan. But a review and a tutorial are two different things — and a lot of people have asked me: "Okay Annie, but how do I actually use it?"Fair question. Let's get into it.This post covers the free ...

AI voices so good, Astro thought someone was actually in the lab.Let me paint you a picture.It's a Tuesday. I'm in the lab. Astro is doing his usual thing — judging me silently from the top of the filing cabinet. I'm testing ElevenLabs for the first time, and I generate a voice clone of myself saying something I definitely never said.Astro's head snapped around so fast I thought he was ...

Two AI giants walk into the lab. Only one gets Astro's approval.Okay. We need to talk about the elephant in the room. Or rather, the TWO elephants in the room, both claiming to be the smartest elephant, both with very passionate fan bases, and both with opinions about whether pineapple belongs on pizza. (Spoiler: I asked both. Claude was diplomatic. ChatGPT tried to please everyone. This tells you a lot.) Welcome ...