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Notes

In-progress thinking — ideas I'm still working out.

2026

The Fork in the Stack The agent era is splitting infrastructure into two camps: those building new primitives and those retrofitting old ones. The bet you make reveals what you think agents are. The Context Engineering Stack I built an internal context engine for our 1,765-doc knowledge base. My teammate independently found a better one. The difference was a reranking step I hadn't thought of. Here's what the emerging context engineering stack actually looks like — and why no single tool gets it right yet. Named Things: A Glossary of Compressed Wisdom The named laws, razors, and principles that keep showing up in engineering and strategy. Each one is a concept compressed into a name — human-language embeddings, built over centuries instead of training runs. The Frontend Testing Gap Backend testing is a solved problem. Frontend testing for stateful, streaming, visual UIs is not. That's exactly where AI coding agents are generating the most code. I Don't Know How to Interview Engineers Anymore What interviewing looks like when AI can write the code but not make the call — and why the same break is happening in every field that used output as proof of understanding. Trails: A Pattern for Navigating Ideas Why I replaced a knowledge graph with curated reading paths, and what I found when I looked for prior art. Toward AI-Native Analytics for Personal Publishing An RFC for a small, legible analytics system — privacy-first, edge-native, AI-queryable — built on Cloudflare Workers. Learning to Take Up Space On the difference between disappearing and controlling — and the third thing that isn't either. Building at the Speed of Thought Your brain processes 10 bits per second. Your WiFi does 50 million. We built entire workflows around pretending the gap didn't exist. Photography After AI What's the value of photography when AI generates pixel-perfect images in seconds? The same thing that's valuable about code when AI writes it: not the output, but the seeing. Memory and Journals AI agents have perfect memory within a conversation and total amnesia between them. What can human journaling teach us about what memory should actually be? The Funeral Test for Your Digital Self From Covey's funeral visualization to company codexes to personal test harnesses — the throughline is intentional identity. Rent a Human A marketplace where AI agents hire humans for physical tasks. The inversion is here. Working With AI How I think with AI, where I don't trust it, and what co-authorship means.