By Tim Hauptrief
A place to think out loud.
Personal reflections, everyday observations, and ideas I’m still working through. Welcome to my personal blog.
What Failed, What Changed, and What We Learned
A first website-building retrospective: removing a repeated excerpt, separating editorial notes from page copy, and verifying saved changes.
The True Cost of Building Software with AI
Software built with AI still has costs: subscriptions, usage, infrastructure, testing, time, and maintenance. Includes a clearly hypothetical example.
Building a Personal Assistant That Supports Decisions Instead of Making Them
A personal-assistant vision centered on clear choices, traceable information, privacy, consent, and human control over commitments.
What Small Businesses Actually Need from AI
Practical questions for small-business AI: organizing job records, drafting work, checking sources, and measuring whether it saves effort.
What Does It Actually Mean to Test an AI System?
A practical look at AI testing: baselines, repeatable tasks, external scoring, time and cost, limitations, and unsuccessful results.
Designing AI Systems That Know When to Ask a Human
How uncertainty, consequences, and reversibility can shape human approval in AI-assisted work, with practical hypothetical examples.
The Problem with AI Agents That Agree with Each Other
Agreement among AI agents can hide shared assumptions. Explore why independent checks and external evidence matter more than consensus alone.
Can Multiple AI Agents Make Better Decisions Than One?
Can multiple AI agents improve decisions? Tim Hauptrief explores the research question, useful comparisons, and the evidence still needed.
Why I Started an MBA While Building a Business
How MBA study and running a business bring classroom concepts and practical decisions into the same conversation.
What Running a Small Service Business Taught Me About Software
The everyday friction of estimates, scheduling, and job records shapes the questions I bring to software development.