August 5, 2026
From Cowriter to Coinventor
The most original part of my workflow engine — the part an adversarial review ranked above everything I designed myself — is not mine. I need to say that carefully, because in March I wrote that...
August 1, 2026
Not a Perfectionist
People call me a perfectionist. Usually with affection, sometimes with a sigh, occasionally in the tone you'd use about a relative who irons their socks. The same people, often in the same breath,...
July 26, 2026
The Agent That Never Read the Manual
Last week an AI agent built two complete admin surfaces in my platform — a live operator console for our data lake and its workspace-owner twin. Nineteen thousand lines across two overnight runs....
July 26, 2026
Twenty Words
In March I wrote that [[Why Every AI-Assisted Codebase Will Collapse (Unless Someone Loves It)|every AI-assisted codebase will collapse unless someone loves it]]. I said there were three things the...
May 1, 2026
The Five Layers
What a Programming Language Is When the Machine Writes Most of It An AI wrote four thousand lines of code yesterday. I wrote about twenty words. The code shipped. The reason it shipped is that...
April 14, 2026
Gall's Law Got Cheap
Six weeks ago I wrote [[The Best Architecture Is the One You Delete]] about a sibling law called [[Liberato's Law]] — the reverse corollary that says the simple system replacing N complex ones...
April 4, 2026
Give Them Their Own Computer
Every week I see a new tool on X that puts a UI around multi-agent coordination. Worktree managers. Branch orchestrators. Agent spawners with dynamic allocation. Merge conflict dashboards. Each one...
March 27, 2026
The Eternal Search for the Perfect PKM App
I have been looking for the perfect note-taking app for sixteen years. I can now tell you with certainty that it doesn't exist, that I've tried all of them, and that the answer was a folder of text...
March 23, 2026
Why I Vibe in Go, Not Rust or Python
Conditional up front: this essay is about Go vs Rust vs Python for AI-assisted development with high machine-write percentage. It is not about Rust-for-humans, where Rust may well be the better...
March 22, 2026
The Rewrite Trap
The software industry has a dirty secret: it rewrites everything every twelve years, learns nothing from the rewrite, and does it again. I've watched this cycle from three angles — as a developer,...
March 22, 2026
The Best Architecture Is the One You Delete
Last week I replaced five systems with one. A NATS KV draft store. A pub/sub bridge. An event publisher. A streaming buffer. A render handler. Each correct. Each solving a real problem. Each doing...
March 20, 2026
Software Dies of Obesity, Not Starvation
Nobody ever killed a software system by not adding enough features. Every software system that has ever died — been replaced, rewritten, abandoned, or quietly moved to a server that nobody monitors...
March 20, 2026
Why Every AI-Assisted Codebase Will Collapse (Unless Someone Loves It)
I work with an AI that writes four thousand lines of code in a day. It is fast, precise, and tireless. In two days last week, it migrated eleven editor panels, deleted an entire domain, wired a...