The best ideas came to me in the car. I built the thing that keeps them.

Every owner I know gets their best thinking away from the desk. Driving between jobs, on a walk, halfway through dinner. Most of the time it is gone by the time you are back at a keyboard.

I built something small to stop losing mine, and I trust it now for a reason that has nothing to do with how it was built.

The resource

I wrote up the exact setup as Talk to your backlog: tap a button, say the idea out loud, and it lands in the list I actually work from. No new app, no typing, nothing to remember to open later. It is free, and it includes the test I now run on anything like it before I trust it with a real idea.

Three from it

Before you trust anything that captures information for you, feed it the ugliest input you can think of. A long pause in the middle of a sentence. A name said with emphasis, like it is in quotes. The bad version does not error out. It quietly drops the input and shows you nothing wrong.

Check the actual destination, not the tool’s own confirmation. Open the real list your captured idea is supposed to land in and look with your own eyes. A clean-looking response tells you the request went through. It says nothing about whether it did the right thing with it.

The same test applies to anything in your business that captures something for you: a contact form, a booking widget, a review request. The bad version does not break loudly. It stops delivering, and you find out from the customer who says they filled it out weeks ago and nobody ever called.

Get it

Read the write-up. It is free, no signup, and it includes the exact test to run before you trust it.

Worth knowing

Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5 on September 22. Opus is the top tier of their model lineup, the one built for the hardest coding and reasoning work. It beats their own bigger, more expensive model on a number of real tasks, and output tokens (what you pay for what the model writes back to you) now cost $20 per million instead of $25.

If you are paying for the top-tier model to run anything in your business, that is a 20 percent price cut for better output, not a tradeoff. Nothing to change today beyond checking which tier your tools default to.