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A Full Disclosure From The Helm: Yes, This Blog Uses AI. No, We Are Not Sorry.
By Dan Ribeiro, CPYB — The Yacht Trader · 2026-03-18
There is a longstanding tradition in yachting of presenting things with a certain effortless elegance. The perfectly pressed whites. The unhurried pour of something cold and expensive. The broker who somehow always knows the tide schedule, the owner's preferred aperitivo, and the name of the surveyor who won't cause drama. We maintain that tradition here. Which is precisely why we are going to tell you something that most yachting publications would rather keep below the waterline: this blog is written with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Dan provides the expertise. Claude provides the sentences. Dan then reads everything, corrects anything factually adrift, and approves it for publication. It is, in yachting terms, a co-brokerage arrangement. Dan is the listing broker. Claude handles the paperwork.
A Full Disclosure From The Helm: Yes, This Blog Uses AI. No, We Are Not Sorry.
A confession, an explanation, and a love letter to the Oxford comma — from somewhere between Brickell and the high seas.
There is a longstanding tradition in yachting of presenting things with a certain effortless elegance. The perfectly pressed whites. The unhurried pour of something cold and expensive. The broker who somehow always knows the tide schedule, the owner's preferred aperitivo, and the name of the surveyor who won't cause drama.
We maintain that tradition here. Which is precisely why we are going to tell you something that most yachting publications would rather keep below the waterline:
This blog is written with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
There. We said it. The anchor is dropped. The cat is out of the tender.
Why AI? Allow Us To Explain.
The author of this blog — one Dan Ribeiro, CPYB, Senior Yacht Broker, MIT-trained negotiator, trilingual closer of seven and eight-figure transactions, and proud son of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil — is, by his own cheerful admission, a man whose relationship with the English language is best described as enthusiastically maritime.
Dan speaks English. Dan speaks Portuguese. Dan speaks enough Spanish to close a deal in Palma. What Dan occasionally does not speak is written English at eleven o'clock at night after a twelve-hour boat show day when he has opinions about Admiral Yachts and absolutely zero patience for comma placement.
And so: Claude.
Claude is Anthropic's artificial intelligence. It writes in complete sentences. It knows where apostrophes go. It has never once typed "teh" instead of "the" or signed off an email with "Best, Dan" followed immediately by three paragraphs he forgot to include.
Dan provides the expertise — the kind of market instincts that cannot be conjured. Claude provides the sentences. Dan then reads everything, corrects anything factually adrift, adds the observations that only come from actually standing on a 75-meter aft deck at golden hour in Fort Lauderdale, and approves it for publication.
It is, in yachting terms, a co-brokerage arrangement. Dan is the listing broker. Claude handles the paperwork.
What This Means For You
Every piece of market analysis on this blog reflects Dan's actual positions — views formed by IYBA membership, real transactions, real shipyard relationships, and the kind of hard-won brokerage knowledge that cannot be retrieved from a training dataset.
Claude does not have opinions on whether a 2020 Sunreef 80 Power is priced correctly. Dan does. Claude does not know which surveyor to call in Palma or which yard in the Netherlands is quietly three months behind on deliveries. Dan does. Claude cannot tell you whether a particular owner is genuinely motivated or just fishing for a valuation. Dan absolutely can.
What Claude does — and does rather well, we think — is take Dan's expertise and render it into prose that does not begin with "So basically" and end with six semicolons in places where periods were clearly called for.
A Note On Quality Control
Nothing leaves this blog without Dan's review. If something is factually incorrect, imprecise, or sounds like it was written by someone who has never actually held a pair of dock lines in a crosswind, Dan catches it. He has strong opinions about accuracy. He also has strong opinions about yards he trusts, deals he won't take, and clients he won't work with — none of which Claude would know to include without being told.
The AI writes the sentences. The broker guarantees the substance. Consider it the maritime equivalent of having your captain handle the navigation while the owner decides where the yacht is actually going.
In Closing
We believe the yachting industry deserves commentary that is both genuinely expert and genuinely readable. We also believe that a Brazilian-born broker who learned English while building a client network in the most competitive marina zip codes in South Florida — and who now closes nine-figure deals in three languages — has earned the right to outsource his subordinate clauses.
The knowledge is ours. The commas are Claude's. The yachts are spectacular.
Welcome aboard.
— Dan Ribeiro, CPYB
The Yacht Trader | Miami
Reviewed, edited, and approved by an actual human who has seen things you would not believe happen on a sea trial.