Trails

Follow a thought.

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

A reader’s
map, not a
timeline.

Different paths.
A deeper
understanding.

Engineering

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

The theoretical layer — what changes when machines are on the other side of the interface.

Design Physics: When Interfaces Meet Agents
Start here — the tooltip written for a machine, and the four quadrants it opened.
Code Owns Truth
Where the constraint thesis gets stated: prompts expire, tests and types survive.
Pervasive AI: What Happens When Your Assistant Never Logs Off
A month with an agent that never logs off.
The Multi-Agent Moment
Then the agents multiply — a survey of orchestration, opened by a merge collision.

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Your Vault, Your Rules: Password Managers, Sovereignty, and Agents
Your secrets as a file you own, now that agents need them.
The Context Engineering Stack
The thesis meets a benchmark — my context engine against a coworker's, and mine lost.
The Loop You Were Already In
The layers close the loop: constraints, prompts, and code cycling without you.
The Org Chart Is the Missing Constraint
The constraint layer gets one more entry: who's allowed to plan, and who only executes.

The mechanical truths about how browsers render, scroll, and stream — and how to test what AI agents can't see.

The Frontend Testing Gap
Start here — agents ship the most code exactly where tests see the least.
Rapid Generative Prototyping: Design in the Post-Figma Era
The fix that generalizes — design as constraints the machine can actually check.

What engineering looks like when agents write the code and humans define the constraints.

What's Left: Software Engineering in the Agent Era
Start here — the floor dropped, and the honest question is which floors still matter.
I Don't Know How to Interview Engineers Anymore
The hiring version of the same break: output stopped proving understanding.
Your Infrastructure Spec Already Moved Into Your Code
Infrastructure specs collapsing into the code the agents read.
Kipple at Scale
What thousands of agents accumulate: correct code, no one feeling the kipple.

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The Loop You Were Already In
Where the practice ends up — designing loops that prompt the agents, one constraint per failure.

How systems know what they know — event sourcing, truth, distributed state.

Self-Healing Systems: The Holographic Event Pattern
Start here — a 2am selector failure and the case for events that carry everything.
Proof, Not Truth: Epistemic Humility in Knowledge Systems
From events to claims: what a system should admit about how well it knows.
Convex and the Reactive Database Model
State that announces its own changes — a database that unsettled the old categories.
The SaaSpocalypse
What happens when execution gets cheap: the week $285 billion left software stocks.

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The Fork in the Stack
The trail ends at a fork: two launches, each a bet on what agents are.

What you optimize for, what you're actually aligned with, and how to tell the difference.

Why Everyone Should Have a SOUL.md
Start here — the case for writing identity down, agents first, humans included.
The Funeral Test for Your Digital Self
Prior art: the funeral test, and the codex as its corporate cousin.
Learning to Take Up Space
The confession underneath: disappearing into rooms, and practicing authorship instead.
Named Things: A Glossary of Compressed Wisdom
Laws and razors that compress judgment into portable names.

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Raising Humans in an AI World
The stakes turn generational — guarding her struggle while building what erases it.
What Are Test Scores Actually Worth?
Measurement in the wild: a school ranker that mostly rediscovered household income.
Why AI Can't Shop for You Yet
It ends in taste — the property no database contains and no protocol transmits.

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

What Cameras Taught Me About Software (and Life)
Start here — better gear, worse photos, and the arc that explains both.
Photography as Interface
The camera as a user interface for reality — what its constraints teach ours.
Photography After AI
AI renders anything in seconds; the camera still proves you were there.

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

Building at the Speed of Thought
Start here — shipping real changes from bed at ten bits per second.
Rent a Human
A marketplace where agents book humans for meatspace errands.
Working With AI
What the split feels like daily — judgment finally unfused from the typing.
When Do We Stop Talking About AI?
Three revisions spent pushing past fluent toward honest.

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Memory and Journals
A quieter question: what a 2019 journal entry preserves that vector recall can't.
Toward AI-Native Analytics for Personal Publishing
An RFC in public: analytics small enough to read end to end.
Trails: A Pattern for Navigating Ideas
The page you're on, explained — why curated paths beat the bouncing dots.
Hello World
End at the beginning: the post that almost didn't happen.