Jason Bann Tech Shot

About the human behind VibeAxis

Proof, not vibes. I write about AI the way it behaves in real life—on your phone, in your workflow, and creeping into your job. No manifestos. Switches flipped, receipts included.

What I actually do here

  • Stress-test AI on humans. If it nudges, tracks, or lies—I try it and show the receipts.
  • Translate the black box. Plain language, sharp edges, zero guru fog.
  • Ship micro-tools. Tiny utilities you can use mid-scroll, no sign-up, no trust fall.

Start here

Tools I made for you

Use them. Break them. Tell me where they fail and I’ll ship a fix.

Editorial spine

  • Steps, not speeches.
  • Receipts or it didn’t happen.
  • Lowest-permission by default.
  • Rollback included.

Full page: Editorial Values

If you want more

Send me a mess

Got a broken workflow, dark pattern, or AI that “feels weird”? Contact me with steps and a screenshot. If I can reproduce it, I’ll publish a fix—credit if you want it, quiet if you don’t.

Verify us

Latest posts

  • How To Run Your Own Receipt Study: Stop Arguing, Start Measuring

    How To Run Your Own Receipt Study: Stop Arguing, Start Measuring

    “Confidence is a costume. Receipts are the clothes.” You don’t need a lab coat, a whitepaper, or a monk’s vow of objectivity. You need one URL, one hunch, and the nerve to write a falsifier in plain English. The tool does the heavy lifting; you just press Run and show your work. No sermon, no…

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  • Prompt Injection for Civilians: When Documents Act Like Bosses—and How to Shut Them Up

    Prompt Injection for Civilians: When Documents Act Like Bosses—and How to Shut Them Up

    How anyone can make a model do something dumb—and how to stop it If a “document” looks like instructions, most models will treat it like a boss. That’s prompt injection: smuggling directives into places the model should treat as data, then watching it obey. No malware, no rootkits—just English with a pushy tone. Here’s the…

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  • Rage-Click Olympics: Timing the Web’s Petty War Crimes

    Rage-Click Olympics: Timing the Web’s Petty War Crimes

    “My cursor is a lit match. Your UI is dry kindling.” I set a timer to measure how fast websites can make me behave like a raccoon in a kitchen drawer. One tap, two taps, three—now I’m rage-clicking a ghost button like it owes me rent. Somewhere, a PM calls this “engagement.” I call it…

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  • Ghosts with API Keys: The Boring Prediction That Pays

    Ghosts with API Keys: The Boring Prediction That Pays

    We spent two years arguing about vibes: prompts, personas, “act like a…”. Cute. The future is chores. A ghost with an API key logs into three services, pulls the doc, pays the invoice, files the receipt, and pings you only if it couldn’t. No sparkle. No TED talk. Just a to-do list that does itself.…

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  • Perplexity vs Google: Find the Source, Not the Hype

    Perplexity vs Google: Find the Source, Not the Hype

    “Search is a verb. Research is a receipt.” You type a claim into the void and get 9 blue links, a sidebar horoscope, and a sales pitch for the same keyword you just wrote. Nice. Then you paste the same claim into Perplexity and it hands you a stitched answer with citations like it’s been…

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  • Vibe Coding: Ship by Feel, Verify by Test

    Vibe Coding: Ship by Feel, Verify by Test

    “Trust your instincts. Then make them beg for unit tests.” You already vibe code. You glance at a file, feel where it’s wrong, and sketch the fix before you can explain it. LLMs just turned that instinct into a workflow. The trick isn’t to worship the vibe—it’s to instrument it so hunches become shippable code…

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  • Prompt NFTs: Selling the One-Sentence Seed Instead of the Art—Peak Grift or Next Wave?

    Prompt NFTs: Selling the One-Sentence Seed Instead of the Art—Peak Grift or Next Wave?

    “You can mint a receipt for a sentence. You can’t mint scarcity for language.” You bought a JPEG of a sentence. Tomorrow, that sentence is obsolete because the model that made it just ate another billion tokens. Welcome to prompt NFTs: scarcity cosplay for something that was never scarce. The sales pitch is ownership; the…

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  • Spam Calls from Future You: Policy > Willpower

    Spam Calls from Future You: Policy > Willpower

    “Voicemail transcription: ‘Stop teaching the algorithm how to hurt you.’” Cold open Your phone lights up: Unknown Caller — You (+5 years). You let it ring the first time. The second time you answer and it’s… you, but with patience. They don’t sell crypto or productivity hacks. They sell relief. Every voicemail is a tiny…

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  • RAG vs. Fine-Tuning: Stop Using a Sledgehammer for Sticky Notes

    RAG vs. Fine-Tuning: Stop Using a Sledgehammer for Sticky Notes

    “Know the difference between adding knowledge and changing behavior—or enjoy paying compute to cosplay certainty.” You don’t need a custom brain to answer, “What’s in our handbook?” You need a model that can look stuff up without lying. But every week someone straps a model to a GPU rack because their PDF wouldn’t paste. That’s…

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  • Kill-Switch Sabbath (Offline Kit)

    Kill-Switch Sabbath (Offline Kit)

    “If it can’t run offline, it can’t be trusted.” You don’t realize how domesticated you are until the bars vanish. Pull the plug for 24 hours and your life stutters like a cheap drone in a crosswind: the notes app that won’t open without “sync,” the map that needs “just a sec,” the playlist that…

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  • Reality Patch Notes (For The Self)

    Reality Patch Notes (For The Self)

    “Treat your life like software. Ship updates, not vibes.” You can’t debug a feeling. You can debug a week. That’s the trick. Most people journal like they’re negotiating with a therapist; you’re going to run release management on your reality. One page. Six lines. Every Sunday. No fluff, no TED talk. You either shipped or…

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  • Hands That Hallucinate: Tactile AI Where “Close Enough” Snaps a Finger

    Hands That Hallucinate: Tactile AI Where “Close Enough” Snaps a Finger

    Vision models hallucinate pixels. Embodied systems hallucinate forces. One wastes your time; the other makes glitter out of glass. Cold open The gripper swore the glass was obedient. The model said “secure.” Physics laughed. Two millimeters of slip, a polite micro-vibration, and a lab beaker turned into glitter. Vision models hallucinate pixels; embodied systems hallucinate…

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  • Terms of Service for a Dream: Click “I Agree” to Continue Sleeping

    Terms of Service for a Dream: Click “I Agree” to Continue Sleeping

    “Close your eyes. Accept the cookies. Try not to click on your ex.” Cold open Sleep is the last offline app, and it still ships pop-ups. Your brain runs a nightly A/B test on meaning; the algorithm inside you edits for drama, not repair. If dreams had a TOS, you’d scroll to the bottom and…

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  • Prompt Debt Collector – Calculator

    Prompt Debt Collector – Calculator

    Most “prompting” is unpaid debugging; this tool turns that into a number. Enter your weekly workload; get Prompt Debt Index, token waste, and $/week burn. Use the receipt to run a 7-day follow-up; if savings aren’t ≥50% of the estimate, the claim is false. Prompt Debt Collector — calculator Audit the hidden cost of re-prompts,…

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  • SEV-2 Protocols: Incident Response for the Self

    SEV-2 Protocols: Incident Response for the Self

    Treat spirals like outages and you stop shipping chaos. You already know “incident response” for servers: detect, triage, contain, recover, postmortem. Cool. Do the same thing for your nervous system. Because when life DDoS’s you at 2:17 AM, you don’t need “vibes”—you need a runbook. This is not therapy cosplay. It’s an operational ritual for…

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  • A/B Test My Memories — Audit the Recall

    A/B Test My Memories — Audit the Recall

    Version A: heroic origin story. Version B: cringe. Which one did the algorithm reward? You ever argue with someone about a night you both lived—only to realize you’re quoting the photo, not the moment? I caught myself doing that. The memory in my head had the color grading of an app. That’s when it clicked:…

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  • AI Dress Code, Human Debt — Metrics Before Mandates

    AI Dress Code, Human Debt — Metrics Before Mandates

    “Compliance theater with better lighting.” You know the story by now: Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong told engineers to onboard AI tools by the end of the week (Copilot, Cursor), scheduled a Saturday meeting for anyone who didn’t, and fired the ones without a good reason. He called it “heavy-handed.” The admission came on Aug 22, 2025,…

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  • Synthetic Social: When Bots Are the Audience

    Synthetic Social: When Bots Are the Audience

    “Write like a human. Rank like a machine. Pick one.” You hit publish and your post gets “read” 12,483 times—except the comments are half boilerplate, the referrers look like a zoo of scrapers, and an AI overview paraphrases your thesis into a lukewarm smoothie. Congrats: you performed for an audience that doesn’t laugh, doesn’t buy,…

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  • Context Window Isn’t Memory. It’s a Goldfish on Caffeine.

    Context Window Isn’t Memory. It’s a Goldfish on Caffeine.

    More tokens ≠ more truth. You paste fifty pages into your shiny AI and it nods like a therapist who bills by the paragraph. Two minutes later, it confidently invents a citation from a book you didn’t include. That’s not memory— that’s improv with better lighting. The “context window” is just whatever the model can…

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  • Local Brains, Zero Witnesses – AI Without The Cloud Cult

    Local Brains, Zero Witnesses – AI Without The Cloud Cult

    A 6-minute field guide to running LLMs on your laptop. Cold Open You don’t need a server farm to think out loud. You need a model that sits on your machine, answers fast, and doesn’t report your midnight prompts to a quarterly earnings call. Local models won’t write your magnum opus, but they’ll draft, summarize,…

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