Topic
Architecture
13 essays and 6 notes, newest first.
Essays · 13
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.
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.
Convex and the Reactive Database Model
How Convex challenges our mental models of databases—not relational, not NoSQL, but something new.
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.
What Cameras Taught Me About Software (and Life)
The arc of creative tools: diverge to learn, converge to create. Why more gear made me worse, and what that means for building software.
Design Physics: When Interfaces Meet Agents
Traditional UX has a hidden assumption: humans on both sides. That assumption is breaking.
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.
Proof, Not Truth: Epistemic Humility in Knowledge Systems
We don't sell answers. We sell receipts. The receipts are what earn the right to call something true.
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 · 6
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.
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.
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.