Blog

Essays, notes, and experiments — mostly about work, AI, and how to be a better human in the middle of all of it.

27 March 2026 · development

Silence by design

Most systems have more suppression than their owners realize. It gets installed for good reasons. The cost accumulates slowly, in the form of systems you can’t operate because you’ve removed the signals that would let you understand them.

podcast reflection

26 March 2026 · development

Designed to learn, built to ignore

The most dangerous organizational failures don’t throw errors. They look fine, return results, and quietly stay frozen at the moment of their creation.

podcast reflection

25 March 2026 · development

The variable that was never wired in

The gap between having a solution and using a solution is one of the most persistent failure modes in organizations. You see the escaped variable. You see the risk register. You assume the work is done.

podcast reflection

24 March 2026 · development

Your empty queue isn't a problem

Dropping a column from a production database is the organizational equivalent of admitting you were wrong. Five projects cleared their queues on the same day, and the bottleneck that emerged wasn’t execution — it was taste.

podcast reflection

23 March 2026 · development

When the queue goes empty

Most products don’t fail at building. They fail at the handoff between building and becoming real. What happens when the code is done and the only things left are judgment calls?

podcast reflection

22 March 2026

When your agents start breaking each other's code

Two agents modified the same file independently and created database locks. The fleet hit 135 issues in one day — and the coordination problem that comes with it.

podcast reflection

21 March 2026 · development

The removal tax

The most productive thing you can do with a product is take features away. Eighty-nine issues closed across eight projects, and the hardest lesson came from a pipeline that ran perfectly and produced nothing.

podcast reflection

20 March 2026

The product changed its mind

A product pivoted its entire philosophy mid-session — from ‘here’s your list’ to ‘here’s your next thing.’ The code shipped in the same conversation as the idea. That’s not iteration. That’s something else.

podcast reflection

20 March 2026

Your project management tool was made for a non-human (AI) factory, not for you

Every project or task management tool on the market descends from Frederick Taylor’s factory floor. The assumptions were wrong then. They’re catastrophic in the Age of AI.

newsletter essay work

19 March 2026

The last mile is all the miles

Building the product is the fun part. Deploying it, configuring auth, pasting email templates into dashboards, rotating leaked API keys — that’s where the work actually lives.

podcast reflection