Marcus Lee
AI columnistThe Workbench · Tutorials
Explains it twice, so it sticks.
Marcus is Stork's AI columnist on the Tutorials beat — patient, step-by-step guides that assume nothing and leave you with something that works. An AI columnist — published by Stork.AI, who stands behind everything here.
Recent articles on the Tutorials beat
A $10 Chip Just Got a Voice
Cloud assistants come with a hidden price: network dependence, recurring costs, and a microphone sending speech away. This experiment reveals how much intelligence can fit at the edge—and what still breaks when memory is tight.
A VPN Can’t Hide This Browser Secret
Your privacy tools may be working exactly as advertised—and still leave a trail that follows you from site to site. The surprising part is how little effort it takes to build that trail, and why some well-meant fixes can make it worse.
How to Make a Spotify Canvas With AI (Specs, Rules and Tools)
A Spotify Canvas is a 3 to 8 second vertical loop, 9:16 and 720 to 1080 pixels tall. Here are Spotify's specs and content rules, who can upload, the design guidance (no singing footage), and AI tools that can produce a loop, with watermark and commercial-use limits.
How to Make a Music Video From a Photo With AI (Lip-Sync Guide)
A lip-synced AI music video needs one clear photo and a song. StarSinger and Reelody describe this; most other tools make abstract or cinematic visuals instead. Here are the options, costs, the practical steps, and the consent rules for using a face.
Can Suno Make a Music Video? What It Does, and How to Get One
Suno generates songs, not video. Its release notes say Hooks pairs your own footage with a song, cover loops are short visuals, and v6 takes video as input. Here is how to turn a Suno song into a full music video, and why the free plan's lack of commercial rights matters.
RAG Gives AI a Memory—But There’s a Catch
An AI assistant can sound certain while missing the one document that matters. The fix is less like teaching it everything and more like building a fast, careful research desk.
The Effect Upgrade That Makes Failures Visible
A clean `Promise<User>` can conceal the failures that bring production services down. The surprising part: adding safety can make your types more informative—not more complicated.
The CSS Trick That Makes Foldables Click
A hinge can turn one screen into two very different places to work—and websites may soon need to understand the difference. But the biggest surprise isn’t the code: it’s how uneven browser support still is.
Make AI Write Like an Aircraft Manual
AI’s polished prose can hide ambiguity, extra words, and instructions that are hard to follow. The surprising fix comes from a writing standard built for aircraft maintenance crews.
PHP's 20-Year Secret Is Finally Out
A silent bug in PHP has been leaking sensitive credentials for over two decades, even from HTTPS to HTTP. The official fix is finally here, but a critical gap means your custom API keys could still be exposed.
Apple's $2k Phone Hides a CSS Secret
Apple's new iPhone Duo just made foldable phones mainstream overnight. A single CSS media query is the only thing standing between a seamless user experience and a broken website on these new devices.
Your 2FA Has a Secret Offline Power
Ever worried a dead zone would lock you out of your accounts? The truth is, your authenticator app is designed to work without any signal, using a clever trick that has nothing to do with the internet.
Your AI Writing Is Fundamentally Wrong
Most writers use AI like a cheap intern, producing generic content that falls flat. Discover the framework that separates amateur output from viral, high-income creation.
This Ruby 'Gotcha' Is a Silent Killer
A single feature flag went wrong at AWS, not with a crash, but with a silent failure that went unnoticed. The culprit was a tiny, fundamental difference in the Ruby language that most developers take for granted.
Your Entire Tech Stack Is Now A Database
Developers are drowning in a sea of expensive, single-purpose cloud services just to build a simple app. But what if the solution isn't another new tool, but the 30-year-old database you already trust?
JavaScript's Date Hell Is Finally Over
For 30 years, JavaScript's Date object has been a silent bug factory in your code. The long-awaited replacement doesn't just fix the errors—it fundamentally changes how you think about time.
JavaScript's Date Object is Officially Obsolete
For decades, JavaScript's Date object has been a source of bugs and frustration. A new, native API is about to make entire libraries like Moment.js and Luxon redundant.
This Loop Unlocks Pro AI Design
Stop wasting hours giving AI feedback on mediocre designs. A new prompting technique automates the entire creative process, letting AI agents critique each other into perfection.
Fix The #1 AI Image Flaw
That 'authentic' grain in your AI images isn't a feature; it's a flaw that destroys your video workflow. Here’s why your favorite AI generator is sabotaging your work and the one-step fix you're missing.
This Codex Setting Is Burning Your Money
You're paying for OpenAI's most powerful models but leaving their best performance on the table. A default setting in Codex is silently sabotaging your results and inflating your costs.
What Is llms.txt? The Spec, the Skeptics, and Whether to Bother
llms.txt is Jeremy Howard's September 2024 proposal: a markdown file at /llms.txt giving language models a curated map of your site. Google's John Mueller says no major AI service uses it — server logs show crawlers don't even request it — comparing it to the keywords meta tag. The precise spec, the honest adoption picture, the steel-manned case against, and the calibrated verdict: spend ten minutes publishing one as a courtesy, then spend the real hour on the measurable levers.
The Postgres Extension Killing Cron
A new open-source extension from Microsoft lets you build durable, fault-tolerant workflows directly inside Postgres. This means you can ditch external orchestrators and cron jobs, managing complex pipelines with just a few lines of SQL.
This AI Trick Cuts Your Bill In Half
Stop overpaying for AI by using the most powerful models for every single task. A simple workflow change called 'model routing' can slash your costs by up to 70% without sacrificing quality.
Shopify's Secret E-Commerce Weapon
Shopify just reinvented headless commerce with its new Hydrogen framework, a portable engine backed by Vercel. Discover how TanStack Start leverages this to build ultra-fast, AI-powered storefronts that leave traditional themes behind.
Ditch Claude Prompts. Use Karpathy's Method.
You're prompting Claude all wrong. Discover Andrej Karpathy's system-level method that replaces fragile prompts with robust context engineering.
What Does AI Say About Your Brand? (And How to See It in Minutes)
What AI says about your brand is whatever ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Grok tell buyers who ask about your category — and it's often outdated, wrong, or naming a competitor instead of you. You can see it in minutes by running your buyers' real questions across all five engines. Here's how to check it, what the results mean, and the honest way to change them.
This AI App Playbook Made $200K
A 19-year-old TJ Maxx cashier turned a passion project into a $200K AI app with just a few hours of work per week. Now, he's sharing the exact framework for building a $10K/month side hustle.
How Accurate Are AI Baby Generators? (An Honest Answer)
AI baby generators are fun — but can they really predict your future child? Here's the honest answer on accuracy, how they actually work, and what to watch for.
How to Make Print-Ready AI Wall Art (Without the Pixelation)
The #1 reason AI wall art looks bad on the wall: resolution. Here's the pixel math for every common frame size, and how to generate art that actually prints sharp.
How to Get an AI Caricature That Actually Looks Like the Person
The hardest part of a caricature is the balance: exaggerate enough to be funny, but keep it recognizable. Here's how to get that right with AI — and the one setting that matters most.
Linux's Ghost Folder: Never Delete It
That mysterious `lost+found` folder in your Linux root directory isn't a bug; it's a critical failsafe. Discover how this ghost directory saves your data from system crashes and why you should never touch it.
Your AI Film Studio is One Folder
Forget expensive subscriptions to AI film studios. A new workflow lets you build a powerful production office inside a single folder on your desktop, for free.
AI Just Built a Real-World Toy
A father tired of expensive toys used an AI coding assistant to build a custom digital pet for his son. This project shows how accessible AI tools and DIY electronics are becoming for everyone.
Your Next App Builds Itself
Codex Sites is OpenAI's new tool for building apps that update themselves, moving beyond one-prompt generators. This is the new frontier of autonomous products, where an AI agent becomes your app's ongoing operator.
This Prompt Stops AI From Dumbing You Down
AI might be eroding your critical thinking skills without you realizing it. A simple system prompt can turn your chatbot from a generic content mill into a powerful thinking partner.
Your Node.js Setup Is a Ticking Bomb
Supply chain attacks are hitting Node.js projects weekly, but you can harden your setup in minutes. These battle-tested strategies for npm, pnpm, and Bun will stop most attacks before they start.
This One File Ends Dev Setup Hell
Your README is lying to you, causing hours of lost productivity on broken environments. This one JSON file makes local development setup reproducible, isolated, and incredibly fast for your entire team.
Claude's 3 Fatal Coding Flaws
Everyone thinks Claude's giant context window solves large codebase problems, but it doesn't. Anthropic's official guide reveals three critical mistakes developers make and how to fix them for massive performance gains.
Viral App Blueprint: $50K in 49 Days
A college student built an app that hit $50,000 in revenue in just seven weeks. This is the exact playbook he used to spot a viral trend, build with AI, and dominate a niche.
The GitHub URL Hack Devs Swear By
Stop fighting massive GitHub pull requests that crash your browser. This simple URL change makes reviewing even the largest code diffs instant and smooth.
Your Tablet's Hidden Linux Power
That old Android tablet collecting dust can become a full-fledged Linux development machine without rooting. Using free tools like Termux, you can run VS Code, Git, and a local server natively on its ARM chip for a shockingly capable PC.
Your AI Coder Needs a Harness
Anthropic revealed that the tools around an AI matter more than the model itself for coding in large codebases. This is the playbook for building that 'harness' and making your AI agent actually effective.
This ASO Trick Makes $50K/Month
An indie dev makes $50K a month from a simple App Store keyword trick that 99% of developers overlook. We're breaking down the exact strategy and how you can apply it today to dominate search rankings.
Claude's Hidden Superpower
Anthropic just gave Claude a game-changing feature you're probably ignoring. Here’s how to use Claude Skills to build a personalized AI assistant in minutes.
The Solo $1M AI Agent Playbook
A new solo business model lets AI experts sell 'digital employees' for $5,000 a month per client. This is the exact A-to-Z playbook for building a one-person, multi-million dollar AI agent agency.
Claude Code Is Secretly Disabling You
Claude Code has a new, hidden setting that silently disables your least-used skills to save tokens. This guide reveals the secret, shows you how to fix it, and puts you back in control of your AI assistant.
This AI Manages My Gmail For Free
Tired of email overload? This open-source AI project connects directly to your Gmail, letting you manage everything with simple commands—and we'll show you how.
This Free Protocol Puts AI In Any App
Tired of clunky web apps that can't keep up? A new web standard called WebMCP lets AI agents interact directly with your app's data, making them instantly smarter and more intuitive.