Topic
AI
20 essays and 15 notes, newest first.
Essays · 20
The Model Is a Centroid Pump. So Is the Review Loop.
Sameness comes from two places: training narrows what a model will produce, and a review loop narrows what survives. I've built something against both and don't yet know if either holds.
The Org Chart Is the Missing Constraint
Most of the new advice on running coding agents validates an older idea: constraints do the work. At multi-agent scale, the constraint that matters most is who holds which decision rights.
The Loop You Were Already In
I stopped prompting coding agents and started designing the loops that prompt them. The loops nest, tight inside medium inside long, each with its own primitives and share of human involvement.
The Oracle Problem
Everyone wants to be the source of truth; almost nobody builds the conditions that let truth survive. From the Delphic Oracle to Grokipedia, the failure is structural, whatever the intent.
Defaults Are Decisions
Every system has defaults, and AI makes them more powerful and less visible. So ask whose assumptions your system is running on.
What Are Test Scores Actually Worth?
I built a school data product for parents. What I built, how my thinking evolved, what an axiom actually is, and where the data runs out.
Your Infrastructure Spec Already Moved Into Your Code
Infrastructure config is collapsing into application code, as build tooling did a decade ago. Void shows where that ends; the choice is whether to ride the platform or steal the pattern.
What's Left: Software Engineering in the Agent Era
When anyone can spin up a coding agent and ship something workable, what actually matters? Not the word soup — the real answer.
Your Vault, Your Rules: Password Managers, Sovereignty, and Agents
On the quiet ethos connecting Buttercup, Enpass, pass, and VeraCrypt — and why it matters more now that AI agents need your credentials too.
Pervasive AI: What Happens When Your Assistant Never Logs Off
I ran a personal AI agent on a Mac Mini for a month and wrote down what I saw. Seven months on: what held up, what didn't, and what a Meta launch taught me about architecture and trust.
Raising Humans in an AI World
What do you teach a three-year-old when the ground is shifting under everyone's feet?
Why AI Can't Shop for You Yet
The properties that matter most in fashion aren't properties of the product — they're properties of the relationship between the product and the person. No protocol fixes that.
When Do We Stop Talking About AI?
The specific exhaustion of a generation that can feel the stitch where human thinking and machine fluency got sewn together.
Why Everyone Should Have a SOUL.md
The case for documented identity in an AI-saturated world. Not just for agents — for humans too.
Rapid Generative Prototyping: Design in the Post-Figma Era
Design is no longer artifact creation—it's constraint architecture. The three-layer model for the agentic economy.
The Multi-Agent Moment
A technical breakdown of multi-agent orchestration: Claude's Agent Teams, OpenAI's Agents SDK, Google Antigravity, Gas Town, Beads, and the community alternatives.
Design Physics: When Interfaces Meet Agents
Traditional UX has a hidden assumption: humans on both sides. That assumption is breaking.
The SaaSpocalypse
Anthropic wiped $285 billion off software stocks in a week. The market fears AI replacing tools; the bigger disruption is what it means for the people who build them.
Code Owns Truth
We obsess over prompt engineering when we should obsess over constraint engineering. The prompt is a request. The constraints are the physics. The code is what ships.
Self-Healing Systems: The Holographic Event Pattern
Every event must carry everything a repair bot needs to act without asking questions. Don't scatter breadcrumbs — ship holograms.
Notes · 15
The Half-Life of a Moat
AI can already clean-room rebuild commercial software. The useful question is how fast each kind of moat decays, and which ones regenerate faster than they erode.
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
My context engine for our 1,765-doc knowledge base lost to one a teammate found, over a single reranking step. What the emerging context stack looks like, and why no tool gets it right yet.
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.
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.
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?
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.