Notes
In-progress thinking — ideas I’m still working out.
Ideas
connections
better questions
a more open notebook.
Unfinished
on purpose.
2026
The Scarcity Shift
Software engineering compensation was built on scarcity, not just difficulty. That scarcity is eroding. The people who survive are either unusually broad or unusually deep.
Everything New Is Old
Vector search in the 90s, badges that followed you through the office, and what happens when you build an AI system without knowing what's already been built.
The Dopamine Layer
A neuromarketing talk got me thinking about reward systems, GLP-1s, and what happens when AI becomes the most sophisticated rationalizer we've ever built.
Kipple at Scale
Large engineering orgs already solved coordination for thousands of humans. How much transfers to thousands of agents — and where does entropy win?
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.