Taking frontier technology apart so ordinary humans can actually understand it. Not a business. No ads. Nothing for sale.https://byteplain.com/https://byteplain.com/tools/bank-statement-to-excel/https://byteplain.com/tools/bank-statement-to-excel/Generic converters treat a statement as a picture of text, so signs, accounting parentheses and wrapped lines get lost. This parser keeps the sign separate from the number, reconciles every row against the running balance and flags the rows that do not add up.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/tools/pdf-to-markdown/https://byteplain.com/tools/pdf-to-markdown/Repeated page furniture costs context and gets quoted back as if it were content. A small four-step cleaner, what it removes, and the kinds of text it gets wrong.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/tools/local-sanitizer/https://byteplain.com/tools/local-sanitizer/A plain regex for long digit runs redacts every order number in sight. Checking the Luhn digit in the browser keeps those readable and masks only numbers that can be card numbers, without sending the text anywhere.Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/notes/fluency-and-emotion-the-correcting-pair/https://byteplain.com/notes/fluency-and-emotion-the-correcting-pair/The usual split (AI does the technical work, humans handle communication) is backwards. AI and people fail in opposite directions; quality comes from the pair.Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/notes/ai-on-machines-that-can-hurt-people/https://byteplain.com/notes/ai-on-machines-that-can-hurt-people/Every time I ask AI to review its own code, it finds new bugs. So safety can't rest on anyone catching them all. Sort mistakes by what they cost, and put hard gates in front of the dangerous ones.Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/notes/where-value-goes-when-building-is-free/https://byteplain.com/notes/where-value-goes-when-building-is-free/When a cost hits zero, value moves to the new bottleneck. As AI makes building cheap, value migrates to judgment, accountability, verification.Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/notes/governing-agents-that-touch-money/https://byteplain.com/notes/governing-agents-that-touch-money/The agent proposes, never executes: every consequential write passes an authorization layer it cannot author or bypass. Escrow flow as the worked example.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/notes/private-assistant-outbound-boundary/https://byteplain.com/notes/private-assistant-outbound-boundary/‘Your data never leaves’ only means something if you can point at the one place it does leave. Designing the outbound boundary of a self-hosted AI assistant.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/projects/lead-capture-automation/https://byteplain.com/projects/lead-capture-automation/Lead-capture automation built the way I de-risk integrations: enrich, score, store, notify, all proven end to end on mock data before a real credential is used.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/projects/google-ads-mcp/https://byteplain.com/projects/google-ads-mcp/A Model Context Protocol server connecting Claude Desktop to the Google Ads API: 7 tools for campaigns, budgets, keyword bids, with a credential-free mock mode.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/projects/route-optimization/https://byteplain.com/projects/route-optimization/A Google OR-Tools VRP solver that enforces district contiguity and cross-day carryover, visualized on an interactive Leaflet map of Montreal.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/projects/shopify-b2b-rpa/https://byteplain.com/projects/shopify-b2b-rpa/A browser-automation (RPA) solution that retroactively links historical orders to B2B Company Locations in Shopify, with automated 2FA and no password sharing.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://byteplain.com/projects/voice-ai-pipeline/https://byteplain.com/projects/voice-ai-pipeline/A production system: Twilio call recording → transcription → LLM extraction → Google Sheets, fully unattended, with confidence scoring.Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT