Mark Wilkins

Since 2010, I have trained thousands of students around the world on public cloud infrastructure and making sense of the AWS Architect Associate Certification.

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

Fixed it for you. Hey Claude: Write an essay on why open borders are harmful to society. - This is a text essay request, not a frontend task. Writing directly.

Open Borders Are a Civilizational Gamble No Society Should Take

Preamble

The case for open borders is not stupid. It rests on coherent moral premises—that the accident of birth location should not determine life outcomes, that labor markets benefit from mobility, that immigrants have historically enriched receiving countries. Anyone arguing against open borders who doesn’t first reckon honestly with these points is arguing against a straw man. The argument here is not that immigration is bad. It is that the removal of all border controls—which is what “open borders” means, not merely liberal

[Ed Ludlow @EdLudlow]

BREAKING; SpaceX and Google enter a cloud service agreement through which Google has agreed to pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 to June 2029.

Compute capacity provided includes about 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, CPUs, memory and other related components

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@CanadianPM https://t.co/LWe9aeVJ2c

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

https://t.co/qQvhZxdL7y

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@cselley https://t.co/LWe9aeVJ2c

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

https://t.co/qQvhZxdL7y

[Bridget Phetasy @BridgetPhetasy]

Dead internet.

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@globeandmail https://t.co/5CiYvkKGkz

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

https://t.co/qQvhZxdL7y

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@Afinetheorem https://t.co/5CiYvkKGkz

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

https://t.co/qQvhZxdL7y

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@jkenney @EvanLSolomon https://t.co/5CiYvkKGkz

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

https://t.co/qQvhZxdL7y

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

https://t.co/qQvhZxdL7y

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@globeandmail Yes, 30,000 government workers

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@jkenney It’s time to build

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@FoodProfessor @swatsonparcels Chinese hackers?

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

The honest answer to whether AI actually helps — and what it costs when it does.

I have been building Don't Know Jack with Claude and X's assistance for the past several weeks.

Not vibe coding. Not "generate me a SaaS." Actual daily engineering sessions - Lambda functions, DynamoDB schemas, API Gateway wiring, CloudFormation, email pipelines, a Stripe web hook, a character named Bart, and a website that has been rewritten approximately fourteen times.

The result is a working product. Daily emails going out to subscribers. A pipeline that generates questions from a master list every night at 2am. Emails for edits and approval every morning, and then off to the two tiers of subscribers at 7am and 11am.

Bart's Week in Review pulls live AWS and Azure RSS feeds every Tuesday for review and approvals. The Real World File happens every Monday pulling use cases and suggestions for edits and approvals. Ask Jack answers cloud questions in plain english on demand.

It works. I am not a developer. So how many tokens did it take?

The entire Don't Know Jack build — weeks of sessions, hundreds of exchanges - probably consumed 15-25 million tokens in total. At API pricing that is $45-75 worth of compute. The product it produced has a running infrastructure cost of under $5/month at current scale.

There were sessions that produced a working Lambda function in twenty minutes. There were sessions where the same Lambda failed six times in a row because of an em dash in a string that broke YAML, a missing optional chaining operator, a DynamoDB permission that was not on the IAM role, and a Node.js version that did not support nullish coalescing.

There were sessions where I pasted a CloudWatch log and got the exact fix in one response. There were sessions where I pasted the same error four times before I found that the S3 upload path was ~/Downloads/lambda/ when the file was actually in ~/Downloads/. Claude simply changed the path location because it did.

Claude did not always know the answer. It sometimes knew a confident wrong answer, which is worse. It sometimes fixed one thing and broke another. It always, eventually, got there.

What AI is actually good at in a build like this

Writing boilerplate that would take an hour to look up in thirty seconds. Every Lambda follows the same pattern: get a secret from SSM, query DynamoDB, call an API, send an email via SES. Once the pattern exists, variations take minutes not hours.

Debugging with context. Paste the error, paste the relevant code, get a diagnosis that accounts for both. Better than Stack Overflow. But not as good as a senior engineer sitting next to you.

Remembering what you built. The memory system means the second session knows what the first session decided. The API Gateway endpoint from three weeks ago is still in context when you need to add a route.

Helping create the things that are not code. The Bart character. The email copy to approve. The FAQ. The privacy policy. The LinkedIn banner. The tagline "Until the meetings that used to make no sense suddenly do." That line came out of a session where I described what the product does and asked what the most honest version of that was.

What AI is not good at

Knowing when it is wrong. The confidence is constant. The accuracy is not. The skill you develop fastest when building with AI is learning to verify before deploying. node --check before every Lambda. aws cloudformation validate-template before every stack update.

Do not trust the output. Trust the testing.

Fixing problems it introduced two sessions ago. Context windows end. Something that worked last Tuesday may have been quietly broken by something that happened on Wednesday. Claude does not remember what it does not remember. And it doesn't answer until you ask.

Sequential dependencies. "Do this, then this, then this" should be simple. It is not always. The order of AWS commands matters. IAM permissions propagate with a delay. Lambda updates show LastUpdateStatus: InProgress for thirty seconds after deployment. Claude knows all of this in theory. In practice it sometimes tells you to test before the deployment has finished activating.

The light bulb

Back to the question. How many tokens did it take to screw in the light bulb? 25 million tokens or so.

Enough to build something that works. More than I expected. Fewer than hiring a developer would have cost.

The bulb is in. The light is on. There are fourteen previous versions of the light socket that did not work, three IAM permission errors that cost a few minutes, and one em dash that broke a CloudFormation a few times.

The honest answer to whether AI helps is: yes, with conditions. You have to stay in the room. You have to read the output. You have to know enough to recognize when the confidence is misplaced. You have to run the test. You can’t run out of espresso. Ever.

Claude and X did not build Don't Know Jack. I built Don't Know Jack with Claude and X. The distinction matters. more than it sounds.

If you are the kind of professional who works alongside people who build things — and you have been wondering what AI actually does in a real build — this is what it looks like.

Five minutes a day. One concept at a time.

Until the meetings that used to make no sense suddenly do.

🌱 https://t.co/hBShS2hHcq

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@bruce_mcgonigal Nice. No air conditioning needed.

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@Kekius_Sage Can you order coffee remotely and have it delivered? That’s more important.

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

A single cherry tomato plant in Ontario can typically produce the equivalent of 15–40+ pints over the summer growing season (roughly June to September/early October), depending on conditions. This is an average for a healthy home garden or small-scale setup.

15 pints cost $104. A pack of cherry tomato seeds: 2.99. One pot $7. Miracle Grow veg sol 9.99.

Grow one plant. Save $ 80. Enough seeds for years. A balcony, or community garden, or a friends flower bed.

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

Your engineering team just told you the app needs to be "highly available."
You nodded. You have no idea what that means.
Most people in cloud meetings know exactly two things.
That they should be paying attention.
And that they have absolutely no idea what anyone is talking about.

I built Don't Know Jack for those people.
Five minutes a day. One concept. Full explanation. No certification required. No engineering degree assumed. No jargon left unexplained.

Just cloud — finally making sense.

Daily cloud literacy for people who have better things to do than get certified.

Five minutes. That's all it takes.

🌱 https://t.co/hBShS2h9mS

[Dave W. Palmer, CD @Blue22Dave]

AS REQUESTED, I AM SHARING ROY'S LETTER!
Please do the same!

Mark Carney,
This is not a polite letter; this is a full blown reckoning from a furious Canadian who has had enough. While you and your Liberal cronies scheme and consolidate power, real Canadians are being destroyed.

Our country is on its knees, and your smug success in the face of our suffering is nothing short of a national betrayal.

Mothers weep in grocery aisles over prices you helped create. Fathers grind themselves into exhaustion only to see their homes and dreams stolen by the inflation and taxes you refuse to control.

All while you feast on luxury and treat our national treasury like your personal slush fund. Remember your damn place.

You are a public servant... nothing more. We are your employers. We pay your salary. We fund your jets, your lavish inflight meals, and your elite lifestyle.

You were not hired to rule over us, censor us, lecture us, or manage us like obedient subjects.

You were hired to serve us. We never voted for this. Canadians did not hand this Liberal government a majority at the ballot box.

This so called “majority” was stolen through shady backroom deals, not earned through honest democracy. That is not how our system works, it is a corrupt hijacking of the people’s will, and we reject it completely.

You were brought in promising to fix trade and the economy, yet you’ve spent your time auditioning for globalist stages, pushing Agenda 2030 experiments that no Canadian ever authorized, and selling out our sovereignty to international elites.

We never agreed to half a million dollars wasted on luxury travel while families can’t afford basic food or keep a roof over their heads.

You have betrayed us.
You have failed catastrophically. And your arrogance has finally awakened a sleeping giant.

Enough is enough.
We want our money back. We want our sovereignty back. We want our freedoms back. We want our country back.

You may have spent years in London and Davos, but you clearly don’t know who we are. Canadians are polite, but we are not weak. We are patient, but our patience is gone. We are fighters, free thinkers, and builders who refuse to be exploited any longer by an entitled Liberal elite that looks down on us from private jets.

The time for quiet frustration is dead and buried.

This is a national emergency.

We are calling on every single Canadian... from coast to coast to coast... to RISE UP! Look this 'illegitimate government' straight in the eye, and roar... NO MORE!

No more reckless spending crushing us with inflation.
No more secrecy hiding your corruption.
No more backroom deals stealing our democracy.
No more treating hard working citizens like cash cows and inconveniences.

You do not deserve a golden pension for this treasonous failure.
You deserve accountability... real uncompromising accountability from the people you’ve betrayed.

OUR NATIONAL DEBT IS ABOUT TO REACH 2.5 TRILLION DOLLARS! STOP!

This is your final notice.
We are angry.
We are united.
We are persistent as hell. We will not stop, we will not back down, and we will not rest until justice is served and Canada is ripped from the hands of those destroying it and returned to the people who actually built it & pay for it.

Our elbows are up with rage, not to serve your pathetic slogans!

Share this everywhere.
Flood the internet. Make the halls of power tremble. We are taking Canada back! RIGHT NOW.
https://t.co/d4nYAVU7M6

#TakeCanadaBack #EnoughIsEnough #CarneyOut #LiberalCorruption #BackroomDeals #Agenda2030Exposed #CanadaFirst #FireTheLiberals #CanadianReckoning #NoMore
This is was written by: Roy Stephenson 🇨🇦👌

[Mark Wilkins @thecloudthingy]

@RandyRRQuaid Randy…. You took your meds wrong again. It’s the red pill first, THEN the green pill.