Topic
Building
9 essays and 7 notes, newest first.
Essays · 9
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.
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.
Convex and the Reactive Database Model
How Convex challenges our mental models of databases—not relational, not NoSQL, but something new.
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.
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.
Hello World
First post. Why I built this blog and what I hope it becomes.
Notes · 7
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 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.
Named Things: A Glossary of Compressed Wisdom
Named laws, razors and principles that keep showing up in engineering and strategy. Each compresses a concept into a name: human-language embeddings, built over centuries.
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.
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.
Rent a Human
A marketplace where AI agents hire humans for physical tasks. The inversion is here.