Writing from
the workbench.
Notes written while the work is still warm: what we shipped, what we broke, and the small details we want to remember the next time we sit down at the desk.
It's time to boil the ocean.
Don't boil the ocean held up for as long as code was expensive. It was a price list, and the prices just collapsed. On the small crews rebuilding the biggest tools, and what that means for the projects you never started.
Earlier
notes.
Logged in chronological order, newest stays on top. We don't prune. The half-formed notes live next to the polished ones, with the dates to prove which came first.
- 1305 Jun · 2026AI4 min read Follow →
The good kind of lazy.
The old programmers prized laziness: not sloth, but the impatience that drives you to build the abstraction so you never write the dull thing twice. A model pays nothing for what it writes, so it never learns to want less of it. Notes on putting the constraint back in the loop on purpose.
- 1229 May · 2026AI4 min read Follow →
The orchestration tax.
Starting an agent costs nothing now, so we started a lot of them. The work piled up faster than we could read it, and the bottleneck turned out to be the same as it always was: one human holding all the judgement. Notes on building around the serial thread instead of pretending it scales.
- 1119 May · 2026House rules3 min read Follow →
The comparison engine.
There's a cost to constantly measuring yourself against the people around you, and it never arrives on any visible invoice. The interior life that needs an unoccupied head to grow simply doesn't get one. The audience you're performing for cannot tell you when the rot starts; they don't see that part.
- 1018 May · 2026House rules3 min read Follow →
The empty room test.
Status is real and useful. Most ambitions are braided strands of private wanting and public signal, and the two feel identical from the inside. The empty room is where you find out which strand was actually load-bearing.
- 0915 May · 2026Security4 min read Follow →
The bug flood.
In April 2026, one AI model found 271 security bugs in Firefox in a single pass, including race conditions and XSLT bugs that had survived twenty years of human review. The numbers don't describe a future threat. They describe this month.
- 0811 May · 2026AI3 min read Follow →
Pull the handle.
AI is a slot machine, and the payouts are good. Getting code out and understanding what the code does are not the same thing, though, and only one of those survives contact with production.
- 0710 May · 2026House rules3 min read Follow →
You're in the wrong room.
The honest read isn't a humblebrag. It's a job description. Most of the job is being uncomfortable in public, on purpose, for years.
- 0609 May · 2026Craft5 min read Follow →
Code is cheap. Design isn't.
LLMs have turned code from a bottleneck into a commodity. That means the hard part of engineering just got harder. It was never writing the code in the first place.
- 0522 Apr · 2026House rules4 min read Follow →
Building loud.
Most studios polish before they publish. We do the opposite. We publish so we polish. Here's what changed when we stopped hiding the workbench.
- 0408 Apr · 2026Owlat7 min read Follow →
Why marketing email needed an open-source tool.
Ten companies own marketing email. Their interests aren't yours. We rebuilt the stack (campaigns, automations, transactional) and put the whole thing under a permissive license.
- 0324 Mar · 2026Draw6 min read Follow →
Local-first, six weeks in.
What we got right, what we got wrong, and the handful of details that separate a 'works on my machine' wrapper from something that earns the dock.
- 0228 Feb · 2026Studio3 min read Follow →
Why the site looks like a riso print.
The web has a dozen design defaults. We picked one that feels like ink on paper instead of pixels on glass. Here's what that gets us.
- 0115 Feb · 2021SEO5 min read Follow →
Link building, honestly.
Half the SEO field swears by it, half thinks it's sleazy growth dressed in a suit. Both are right, depending on how you do it. Notes on the slow way, the fast way, and the time we watched the fast way blow up a domain.