#016 - What I've Been Up To

November 2, 2026

Phew, a lot has shipped in the last few weeks, and I'm on stage in Vancouver later today. So this one is a catch-up.

Two talks in Vancouver this week

I'm speaking twice this week, both about AI visibility.

Today, I'm at BIOS SPHERE at Science World with a 20-minute talk: Measuring AI visibility without fooling yourself. It's a one-day, single-track event for AI builders. Excited for this one! So nice to see new events pop-up in the city.

The written companion is up on my site if you’d like to follow along remotely.

On Friday, I'm running a 90-minute hands-on workshop at WordCamp Canada. This will take the same foundational talk and extend it into a hands-on workshop for business owners and site builders to learn directly by testing and measuring their sites.

Both share one idea. There's no score or rank to win. Every AI answer is a draw, and you're shifting the odds.

Everything I'm speaking at lives on my speaking page.

Tether Mobile relaunch

Tether Mobile, my service that forwards SMS messages to email and messaging apps, relaunched in October with a new site, and upgraded features.

You can now get a real US mobile number on a carrier line, instead of a VoIP number. That matters for banks and 2FA codes, which many digital nomads and expats use my service for.

If you happen to need SMS forwarding and want to try it, this link gets you 50% off your first month.

I'm also working on agentifying the product. This will be especially useful for businesses and teams who need to get SMS connected into their tooling and workflows.

Image Salon relaunched, and we build websites now

Last week, my brother Daniel and I relaunched Image Salon. It's so much fun working together.

Daniel and his wife Davina started Image Salon around 2014 to help photographers with editing and retouching. I joined in 2016 and amongst my many other endeavours, I’ve led the tech side of Image Salon ever since. Covid and then AI hit the photography and retouching industry hard, and we've had plenty of ups and downs over the years - this is an exciting time for the business.

The relaunch brings a streamlined post-production line. And the headline: we now design websites for photographers, with AI and humans working together. Behind the service is a full website building and hosting platform. Our tiny team could never have taken that on before AI.

Daniel and I have been building websites together since we were kids. At 9, I sat hunched behind him while he futzed around in a cracked copy of Photoshop, then built his designs in Dreamweaver. We've come a long way since! It’s so cool to put decades of our experience together into this new offering.

Agentsy.report is growing up

Agentsy.report, the AI visibility platform Marius and I have been building, is getting some upgrades.

There's a new version of the free scan. Same idea: see what AI tools say about your business, what they cite, and what to fix next. More technical checks, a better engine powering the whole thing, and more useful data you can take back to your own AI agents to improve your site.

The human-powered audits that Marius and I run also got an upgrade. We've done a handful, and each one taught us something about what to check, what to skip, and how to present it, and we’re now able to go deeper than ever before with our checks.

This behind-the-scenes work has also enabled us to start offering ongoing monitoring. We’ve started with a few of our audit customers, but will soon be looking at offering standalone monitoring.

If you are interested in monitoring how your business performs with AI searches, please get in touch!

The tools I've settled on

I've tried a lot of agent tools this year (Claude, Codex, Cursor, Herdr, Solo, Devin, Dot, Duet, OpenCode, to name a few). I've now settled on two products, plus some tools of my own.

Amp is where I build. Every project runs through Amp threads now. I'm enjoying it so much that I’ve been converting friends and colleagues to it! It’s orbin’ time! iykyk

Grok Bot is my admin and operations hub. It helps me run multiple business streams and client projects at once and stay on top of everything - with a dedicated bot for discrete operational jobs.

The two talk to each other. When Amp ships a change to Tether Mobile, it tells the Tether Support bot what changed, so it has the context when a customer writes in. And when the bot spots something that needs fixing, it can start an Amp thread.

The tools I've built hold the rest together:

• PlanMode is my system of record. Agents interact with it for tasks, plans, memory, past sessions, maintenance logs and more. Every agent, regardless of platform or provider, can read and write to it via MCP. I’m still not sure if I’ll productize it, but it’s a strong maybe. Waitlist is open!
• Librarium is my multi-provider deep research CLI. It’s open source and version 2 is now out. It works as a CLI, MCP, Javascript library and now also as a Laravel package.
• I’m sure some of you have heard of Jev and similar decision making models for fast, cheap, typed judgments. I've open-sourced a few libraries around it, including jev-mcp and jev-browser. More to come on this front later.
• Headroom is a desktop Mac app I put together over the last weeks that shows usage and limits for all my AI accounts in the macOS menu bar. There's so many of these apps out there, but this one is mine and works just the way I want it to and supports services I haven't seen others support.

Keep shipping,
Joey

P.S. Coming to BIOS SPHERE or WordCamp Canada? Hit reply so we can say hi. And if you've got an agent that needs a phone number, I want to hear about it!