The AIMomLab

I spent 11 years building the decisioning systems banks use to approve or deny credit. So when my sister-in-law told me she was closing her oldest credit card to "clean up her file," I nearly spit out my coffee. Let's fix a few of these myths before they cost you real money. Myth 1: Checking your own credit score hurts it This one refuses to die. Here's the actual mechanic: there are two types of inquiries, soft and hard. When you check your own score through your bank app or a monitoring service, that's a soft inquiry. It never touches your FICO or VantageScore calculation. Hard inquiries only happen when a lender pulls your file because you applied for actual credit, a mortgage, a car loan, a new card. The scoring models literally can't tell the difference between you checking your own score and, say, your mom checking it for you. They just don't count soft pulls. Check your score weekly if you want. It changes nothing. Myth 2: Closing old, unused ...

My kid asked me what I do for work and I said "I build robots that talk to other robots to decide things." She was satisfied with that answer. Most whitepapers I read on multi-agent systems could learn something from a six-year-old's tolerance for plain language. I have spent 11 years building the AI and risk-decisioning systems banks use to approve or deny credit and catch fraud before it drains someone's account. Somewhere in the last few years, everything I build got relabeled "agentic." Same architecture, fancier name. So let me tell you what a multi-agent system actually is, using the stuff I have actually shipped, not the stuff in a vendor deck. Forget the Definition, Here's the Mental Model A multi-agent system is a group of narrow, specialized programs that each do one job well, hand off their output to each other, and someone or something coordinates the handoffs. That's it. No soul, no consciousness, no robot uprising. Think of it li...

I've spent 11 years building the decisioning models that banks use to score you for credit cards and flag your transactions for fraud. So when a budgeting app tells me its AI "learns your spending patterns," I don't hear marketing. I hear a categorization model probably running on merchant category codes and a logistic regression bolted onto a chatbot. I wanted to know which ones actually work once the pitch deck ends. So I linked three apps to my real checking account, one credit card, and a joint account with my husband, and I lived with them for a month. The setup: same data, three different brains All three apps pulled from Plaid, which means they're all working from the same raw feed most fintechs use, ACH transactions, card auth and settlement data, and account balances refreshed a few times a day, not in real time no matter what the app claims. The difference isn't the data. It's what each app's model does with it. I ran Copilot, Monarch, an...

I spent 11 years building the models banks use to decide if you get approved or declined. When my sister-in-law asked me last month how to bump her score before a mortgage application, I didn't send her some blog post with 47 vague tips. I told her exactly what to do, and it moved her score 41 points in about three weeks. The trick isn't glamorous and is not a loophole. It's understanding how FICO actually calculates utilization, and then exploiting the timing of your statement date instead of your due date. Almost nobody does this because almost nobody knows the difference. Your due date is a lie, your statement date is the truth Here's the thing most people get wrong. They think paying their credit card bill by the due date is what matters for their score. It's not. What matters is the balance sitting on your account when the issuer reports to the bureaus, which happens on your statement closing date, not your payment due date. Those are usually 20-25 days a...

My kid asked me last week why the "computer" said no to her lemonade stand loan application (long story, don't ask, it involved a play bank app on my old tablet). I gave her a real answer because that's the only kind I know how to give. Then I realized I've never written that answer down for adults either. So here it is. I've spent 11 years building the risk-decisioning systems banks use to approve or deny credit and flag fraud. I've sat in the room when a model got shipped that quietly started rejecting a group of applicants it shouldn't have. I've also sat in the room when a smarter agent caught fraud that would have cost real money. Let me walk you through what's actually happening when an AI agent looks at your loan application. It's Not One Decision, It's a Relay Race People imagine a single AI reading your application and going thumbs up or thumbs down. That's not how it works, not at any bank I've seen. It's a pi...

Is AdSense really too much work for your return on time and investment?  How much can you make with AdSense? I haven't made a single dollar yet after 3 months of trying to get AdSense Approvals. Here's why: Really, is it worth it - is the juice worth the squeeze on this effort.  Maybe. I'm here to explore some of the pros, the cons and the detrimental journey they make you hoop through before you get to any monetization or even making $1. Then you can decide if it's worth it for yourself.  I started off three months ago thinking this is all going to be easy with the help of AI. I'll use ChatGPT, Perplexity and some other at this point commonly known tools. But I was wrong. First it was easy to come up with a few articles. I created 36 in my first month which was enough to apply. I figured it's unlikely I'd get approved the first time around, but I was still hopeful.  Then the rejection came and I was a bit surprised - what I was flagged for was not only low ...

How I Lowered My Optimum Bill from almost $140 to $55 (with tax and tip) - in 38minutes I’d been paying Optimum around $140 per month for Optimum's Triple Play package or similar—TV, Internet, and Phone. Over time, the cost had crept up with fees, regional sports charges, and equipment rentals. And truthfully I barely used the landline and the basic TV and mostly streamed my shows on youtube or Amazon Prime Video. It didn’t make sense anymore to pay 3x what some other competitive providers offer. The most annoying part of this whole call was the wait time when i called. So just brace yourself for patience and go read a book or write an email while you're listening to zesty music on hold. It's not uber annoying mellow so you can get some things done while waiting with on speaker.  I asked ChatGPT for a script to get me a discount and all the points I can make. Here it's all about the prompt engineering. I also asked about staying polite, firm and negotiating solid dea...