Skip to content

Trails

Curated reading paths — pieces ordered by how the thinking builds, not when they were published. Start anywhere.

Designing for Agents

From interface physics to constraint architecture — what changes when machines are on the other side.

  1. Design Physics: When Interfaces Meet Agents

    Traditional UX has a hidden assumption: humans on both sides. That assumption is breaking.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Pervasive AI: What Happens When Your Assistant Never Logs Off

    I've spent a month running a personal AI agent on a Mac Mini. The technology works. The promises don't — at least not the way we were told they would.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Identity & Alignment

What you optimize for, what you’re actually aligned with, and how to tell the difference. On staying human while the ground shifts.

  1. Why Everyone Should Have a SOUL.md

    The case for documented identity in an AI-saturated world. Not just for agents — for humans too.

  2. The Funeral Test for Your Digital Self

    From Covey's funeral visualization to company codexes to personal test harnesses — the throughline is intentional identity.

  3. Learning to Take Up Space

    On the difference between disappearing and controlling — and the third thing that isn't either.

  4. Raising Humans in an AI World

    What do you teach a three-year-old when the ground is shifting under everyone's feet?

  5. 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.

Systems & Engineering

Architecture, epistemic humility, and what happens to the craft when the tools change.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Convex and the Reactive Database Paradigm

    How Convex challenges our mental models of databases—not relational, not NoSQL, but something new.

  4. 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.

  5. I Don't Know How to Interview Engineers Anymore

    What interviewing looks like when AI can write the code but not make the call.

  6. The Proxy Broke Everywhere

    Engineering hiring, university exams, the bar, the LSAT — every evaluation system that relied on output as proof of understanding is breaking at the same time, for the same reason.

  7. Your Infrastructure Spec Already Moved Into Your Code

    Infrastructure config is collapsing into application code — the same pattern as build tooling a decade ago. Void showed us the destination. The question is whether you want to ride the platform or steal the pattern.

  8. The SaaSpocalypse

    Anthropic wiped $285 billion off software stocks this week. The market is panicking about AI replacing tools. But the real disruption is what it means for the people who build them.

Seeing & Making

Cameras, constraints, craft — the thing itself, not the optimization of it.

  1. 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.

  2. Photography as Interface

    What camera mechanics teach us about designing for attention, perception, and control.

  3. 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.

Building in Public

Speed of thought, rent a human, and what it feels like to make things right now.

  1. Building at the Speed of Thought

    When execution is nearly free, iteration replaces deliberation. That's the real shift.

  2. Rent a Human

    A marketplace where AI agents hire humans for physical tasks. The inversion is here.

  3. Working With AI

    How I think with AI, where I don't trust it, and what co-authorship means.

  4. 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.

  5. 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?

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Hello World

    First post. Why I built this blog and what I hope it becomes.