How Ambient Advantage was built, and is still being built. Architecture deep-dives, component notes, gotchas, and the conversations with Claude that got me here. Start with the architecture deep-dive below, or jump into a specific component.
I'm not an engineer, but over the last several weeks I built a production AI system in my spare time, with Claude Cowork as my code assistant. This is the story of how it came to be, and why I didn't start by sketching an architecture diagram.
Each box on the architecture diagram has its own page. Click in to read everything I've written about that component: design choices, gotchas, things I'd do differently. Empty cards mean a post is on the way.
The serverless compute that runs the daily pipeline. Scales to zero, costs nothing when idle.
Managed cron. Fires the morning trigger that wakes the pipeline.
CI/CD. Watches the service repo, builds the container, deploys to Cloud Run on push.
Two collections, no migrations. Tracks pipeline state and episode metadata.
Where the daily MP3 lives. Public-read URL feeds the podcast RSS enclosure.
Where the API keys live. Mounted into the service at startup.
Claude Sonnet for research with web_search; Claude Opus for writing, self-review, and the transcript.
Two-voice text-to-speech that turns the transcript into a real-sounding podcast.
Visual generation: diagrams and banner images. Right tool for the pixel job, for now.
Drafts, sends, and labels live inside my own Gmail account. OAuth, no SMTP server.
Source of truth for the service code and all four content sites. Contents API for daily commits.
Hosts the static sites. Watches GitHub, rebuilds within a minute of every commit.
Subscriber email delivery. Two publications: one for the daily briefing, one for Chiel's Take.
The Build Log is the behind-the-scenes. The Daily Briefing is the front-of-house. Every weekday morning, the AI news that matters for business leaders.