Category: Work Diary

Simple solution:

In your dockerfile … swap out

    postgres: 
        image: 'postgres:17'

for

    postgres: 
        image: 'postgis/postgis:17-3.5-alpine'

https://hub.docker.com/r/postgis/postgis

Then put this in one of your migrations

    public function up(): void
    {
        DB::statement('CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS postgis');

Pydantic AI is an interesting library … it’s the best way to create agents and one of their examples is a basic one which acts as a bank account agent, where you can either find out what your balance is, or block your card.

You can see the rest of the source code on the page but what’s interesting is how it uses LLMs to interpret your request to see if it will take a certain action or not.

So you can run the agent with

result = support_agent.run_sync('what is my balance?', deps=deps)

This returns:

support_advice=’Your current account balance is $123.45.’ block_card=False risk=1

But I can also do something like

result = support_agent.run_sync('i need to see if i have enough to buy a dog, my wife has spent it all', deps=deps)

support_advice=”Your current account balance is $123.45. Please check the price of the dog you want to buy to see if it’s within your budget.” block_card=False risk=5

Which is quite funny really … so it’s shown the user to see the balance because its interpreted it as a show balance action, and whilst I’m not sure banks would want the rest of it, it’s quite funny.

However if I dont indicate balance intent …

result = support_agent.run_sync('My dog died :-(', deps=deps)

support_advice=”I’m very sorry to hear about your loss, John. Losing a pet is incredibly difficult. If there’s anything I can do to help you with your banking needs during this tough time, please let me know.” block_card=False risk=0

In this above case, it just sends a message back but doesnt show the balance.

https://ai.pydantic.dev/#tools-dependency-injection-example

The big thing right now is pushing the Stripe integration over the line. Once I’ve done that I can start taking payments from customers and begin that process.

Because I potentially have a US customer, I took a look at tax requirements. I didn’t realise it was so complex to sell to the US. Each state has differing rules, but in the main it sounds like the threshold is $100,000 over 12 months at which point you have to register with the state for taxes, and start paying them.

Currently my offering is not a SaaS product, but that’s the plan in the future. At the moment I am doing effectively technical services to companies i.e. consultancy and software development – customers retain a set number of consultancy & development hours each month.

US Tax Is Complex!

I didn’t realise US taxes were so complicated. Sales tax is due to each state individually:

In most states, the threshold for economic nexus is $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions over 12 months. There are exceptions, though; for example, in Texas and California the threshold is $500,000.

Although SaaS products count as digital products, they often have unique regulations because they’re not necessarily downloaded. For example, SaaS sales are 100% taxable in Connecticut but non-taxable in California. And in Texas, SaaS products are taxed at 80% of the sale price, while downloaded software is fully taxed. See where SaaS is considered taxable

Stripe Tax will deal with it all, but Spark doesn’t support it

Whilst Stripe Tax seems to be the solution, which is great, I have a decision to make about Laravel Spark … this was the package I was going to use to manage subscriptions and had bought a licence for. However it doesn’t support Stripe Tax, which I think is a big negative.

Spark does not currently support Stripe Tax. You should disable Stripe Tax via your Stripe dashboard when using Spark.

https://spark.laravel.com/docs/spark-stripe/taxes#taxes

This is a big issue, since I would be much happier using Stripe Tax to manage everything. It’s really annoying but my fault for not properly reviewing Spark’s docs.

I’m probably over thinking it at the moment. The options are:

• Keep Spark, switch of Stripe Tax, and let Spark deal with the taxes. Whilst Spark has probably done a great job, I wouldn’t trust them as much as I would Stripe. I would prefer to get this right now, as I don’t want to have to reverse six months down the line.
• Get rid of Spark for this particular project and integrate Stripe Checkout instead. I’m not going to lose much time right now, so it’s not a big problem. There’s potentially another UK based project that I could use it for absolutely fine.

The best thing to do at this point would be to remove Spark entirely from the system (I wasn’t liking the interface anyway) and rely on Stripes subscription handler, which would take care of the taxes. I won’t lose much time by making the switch now, and it would allow me to take instant payments this week.

Some Interesting Stripe Guide On Taxation

• https://stripe.com/gb/guides/introduction-to-us-sales-tax-and-economic-nexus
• https://stripe.com/gb/guides/introduction-to-saas-taxability-in-the-us
• https://stripe.com/gb/guides/introduction-to-eu-vat-and-european-vat-oss

Also, this image below shows where SaaS products are liable for tax:

Tired today but wanted to get my thoughts down in a work diary.

WordPress is a really good platform.

I have recently been making a few websites in NextJS/React … and because you can get lots of wonderful react web block components, it was quite an attractive to develop with. But the problem for clients is that they would have to pay for Sanity integration, or pay me to update their websites. Which is OK if you want to earn a few hours here and there, but it’s not an effective way of doing things.

I forgot how good WordPress is. For some reason I became a typical developer snob of WordPress. But the ecosystem has seriously improved. I don’t know too many other CMS’ with the most recent being Statamic. I’ve had a glimpse at Sanity on React but that’s about it. Anyway, the point is, the ease of use of WordPress is probably unchallenged. It’s really easy to get up and running. I haven’t as yet done anything more than posts but I have enjoyed the writing experience. Everything just works as you want it to.

I don’t know why I went off it, I could have easily kept on making WordPress websites and made a lot of money doing them. Potentially even could have made my own WP template or plugins and made a ton of money. But I decided to move onto more complex software stuff, which is fine.

I wonder what CMS’, or indeed the internet will look like in 20 / 40 years. I may make it to 40 years but not much beyond that in all probability. At any rate, I will see a glimpse of the future. Will WordPress be around in 40 years? Well, as long people still want to publish content to the interweb, it probably will.

Anyway, the point is, WordPress is really good. It’s a great platform, and I can easily see, although I haven’t looked yet, AI plugins that just summarise your entire wordpress blog and let you query it. I may well build that just to see how easy it would be to integrate. Would be good to have my own WordPress plugin for that anyway.

Could also make a plugin that summarises a post, and then deploys it to all the social networks, rewriting it a bit, etc. Fairly obvious stuff but cool nonetheless.

Eerie Positive Reinforcement from ChatGPT

The other day I copied all of my posts and put them straight into ChatGPT. Here’s what it said:

Your blog reads like a mix between a tech founder’s diary, a strategic playbook, and an experimental lab for AI, marketing, and self-discipline. It’s got rawness, vision, and momentum—exactly what you need at this stage. The way you’re thinking about “Tactical Stress”, positioning, and AI-driven marketing is spot on.

That’s the first time, ChatGPT has given me positive reinforcement that actually felt real and genuine funnily enough. Unless ChatGPT is flattering me in some way, which I don’t think it could unless I asked it to.

Since I needed to get a landing page up for Stripe to verify before I could start using the account, I asked it to help me with my marketing landing page.

ChatGPT is good at tightening up marketing language, as long as you give it detailed context and your own starting point

AI / LLMs certainly raise the bar in work quality. I still believe the human element is essential. I sent an AI email yesterday and it felt wrong afterwards. There’s something non-genuine about it. Even though it was a tweaked version of my own.

Anyway, I showed it a version of my landing page. Remember that I had given it context of my entire blog so it had a vivid idea.

Where to Go from Here?

Your current website content is good but too broad—it sounds like a generic tech agency rather than a cutting-edge AI transformation hub. If you’re positioning yourself as an AI R&D pioneer, we need to refine your messaging to make it sharper, more compelling, and action-driven.

It then gave some ideas, so rather than second guessing I just implemented them. Of course, I still am doing this manually at this point

I’ve taken some screenshots of current work in progress for prosperity.

These are a really good starting point. Got a bit more to do.

Last night I managed to get the existing AI platform working after a long time of pulling my hair out.

In the end I made a new MacOS user, booted up the docker containers and the platform worked straight away.

I’m assuming some obscure system, environment, docker configuration was blocking it.

Anyway, frustrated by that but I did expand my knowledge of the codebase and how it all works.

Also fixed another major bug involving GitHub access keys which was holding us up.

Laravel Forge + Digital Ocean

Today amongst normal life things, my main focus was just taking a few steps forward on the devops side of things.

I now have kintronix.ai live with a basic Laravel Jetstream install. This means that basic user registration, team management and a basic user dashboard is in place.

I also setup staging.kintronix.com and secured that site with simple htaccess.

So, I’m happy with the work done today.

Had a load of random tasks come into my reality today; but decided to stay focused on just building through my roadmap. I know I need to write it all down at some point but for the moment just going with the flow.

I’ve got some existing customers that’s that I need to talk to, and some tasks to complete for them. And there’s a demo to sort out for next Tuesday which is pretty much an impossible task and no idea just yet how I’m going to approach that.

For the moment I’ve got Laravel JetStream up and running. Had to do some docker tweaks to get Laravel Sail working with Postgres. JetStream gets some basic dashboard stuff up and running.

… which also has basic user functionality, and two factor auth which I will want to test to see how it works. Also browser session clearing is quite fun to have.

At any rate, I’m not sure about using JetStream totally, but for the moment it will serve a purpose. I don’t like Inertia and this would force that architecture, but I can figure it out. I also want to use my React dashboard, but I will have to also figure out the best way to integrate that. It may be that I just use the Fortify stuff and rebuild the UI and functionality. Will see.

Next is going to be hooking this up to Forge and getting deployment working.

Had to scrap the Forge server and build it again this time implicitly requesting for postgres. Have realised I am going to need alternative setup for the python API that I will be building. But will come to that when I get there.

But whilst I am doing this, I realise that I could just upgrade to Postgres 17 and see if that will work.

https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-17-released-2936

Reprovisioned the server and got it to match the local Laravel Sail setup exactly. Needed to tweak the postgres up to 17, ubuntu to 20.04, and PHP to 8.4. This now matches the local Docker to the remote Forge server. Less likely to get random bugs that I don’t understand in the future.

Once I had done:

• Deleted and created a new Server on Forge
  • Matched Ubuntu, PHP, Postgres versions to the local docker
• Resynced with github repo

… finally got it up and running … and wasn’t encountering any missed migrations or server errors.

Excellent!

I hadn’t expected to need to think about a fundamental business decision within hours of day one, but that’s the way things go.

My newly appointed office, based out of the local Wetherspoons, at £1.80 for unlimited hot drinks, is a good place to start the day when you don’t have an office. 🙂

Anyway, last three hours has been a solid meeting with someone I very much respect. It very much impacts what I am doing, and a high level analysis is:

• There is a prebuilt codebase available to me, that isn’t too far away from being a ready product in the AI sector.
• I can form a company with this person, and build that company beginning with this product.

The challenges are:

• The tech stack is something I am not 100% familiar with. I was very, very much wanting to go with Laravel + React/Vue + Python + Flutter. This is sort of similar but based on the https://www.graphile.org/news/graphile-starter/ start kit. Most notably I wanted to use Laravel for the backend ‘brain’ but this would negate that.
• I have been trying for a few weeks on and off, to get this working locally. We got it working on a Linux box last night, but to no avail on my MBP. So I haven’t really had the opportunity to really get to grips with it. This is the big blocker.

The opportunities are:

• The person in question is talented and experienced and would be a huge, huge force in going forward. He is, subject to caveats, happy to let me run with it as CEO.
• Of what I know of it, the system has working parts that are very much part of my roadmap.

For the moment that’s all I am going to write on the subject. I’m going to get on with other things today, and sleep on it. And figure out a way to get the product working locally where I can use it.

Back to Laravel

Laravel JetStream

The main problem I have is that the rest of the frontend I want to use is built with React components. I have way more access to React frontend components than Vue components. I can work with both, but since I already have some sort of dashboard ready to go built with React/Next … I have to think this through.

I’m choosing to build first with JetStream because that will implement the Laravel Fortify things that I need. I don’t want to put time into custom implementing my own auth structure right now, and JetStream will be a good starting point. I will be able to port things further down the line. Also Laravel Spark works well with JetStream so that’s a bonus.

Laravel Spark is really important because that’s how I envisage getting paid eventually, through a subscription access to the system.

I’ve got somewhere to be tonight, and didn’t expect a couple hour meeting (which is totally great), but still aiming to get something small up and running today as a small milestone.

Onwards.