Personalized Software
When agentic coding lets a vim user write a custom mouse-aware floating picker because Telescope couldn't do that. The implication for SaaS: programmability stops being a nice-to-have, it becomes the moat.
Archive
All of my posts.
My AI Coding Workflow
An iterative spec flow built on a small Makefile and a handful of markdown files — issue, todo, lessons, specs — cuts through the opaque magic of workflow tools. The trick is treating specs as sketches that bound the agent's search space, not exact behavior to confine it. Let AI bringing in world's knowledge!
The Week Everything Changed
The week of February 23, 2026: Dorsey's layoffs, Cloudflare's one-engineer Next.js rewrite, Karpathy's tweet. Picking up Conductor, OpenCode, and OpenSpec over a weekend and shipping 15K lines on Parley — agentic coding is no longer the toy it was ten months ago.
AI as the Next Abstraction Layer
LLMs are fundamentally stochastic, but that's not new — the whole ML field always was, and it worked. The interesting question is how to ground stochastic computation in deterministic domains. Two paths: build a deterministic shell around the model (coding), or apply it directly where the domain itself tolerates noise (recruiting, marketing, design).
To Type or Not to Type
Mainstream type systems are simultaneously too strong (closed-world assumptions hurt during change) and too weak (can't say "positive integer" or "age between 0 and 200"). For startups in unsettled domains, duck typing wins — types are a luxury you afford after product-market fit.
Data vs. Anecdotes: Which to Trust?
Two quotes about data and intuition. "I trust your data, and my intuition" subtly inverts the knowledge hierarchy and subjugates domain expertise to authority. Bezos's version — when anecdotes disagree with data, investigate the measurement — is the better instinct.
On Organic Process
Eight questions to ask before introducing a new process. People overestimate how much process helps, underestimate the cost of maintaining it, and assume it'll work just because it exists. And remember, processes rarely die on their own — the ritual often outlives the purpose.
When Judgment Slips
Judgment slips when decisions become emotional — when you're defending a person, a past call, or a principle rather than solving the problem in front of you. Four signals to watch for in yourself, and four ways to guard against them.
Supreme Court on Trump Tariff
Notes from the IEEPA tariff oral arguments. "Regulate importation" can plausibly mean tariff — but the power to tax is squarely Congress's, the Major Questions and Non-Delegation Doctrines bite, and the one-way ratchet of presidential power makes this near-unanimous against the administration.
How to Parli
Notes from judging a high school parliamentary debate. The opposing side isn't an adversary, it's a collaborator in a joint quest for truth — and the kitchen-sink approach loses on me every time. Logos 70%, ethos 20%, pathos 10%.