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Field notes on AI, data products, and spec-driven development, with detours into Formula 1, economics, and life
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Right Knowledge, Right Lifetime
An AI assistant forgets everything between sessions unless you build the memory yourself. Three scopes, one rule, and why a lesson has to land in the file that matches its lifetime.
WorkHow I Work
The six rules I actually check against when I write a spec, review an agent's output, or call something done. The long version, with the stories.
WorkMake Something With Your Hands
The more I automate, the more the unautomatable matters. Why my most AI-powered year has also been my most physical one, and a small assignment.
PersonalWork AI vs Personal AI
The same tools on two different leashes. What running AI at a global bank and letting it run my own website taught me about each other.
TechnologyEverything Is a Subscription Now
The sticker price of modern life is a fiction. The real price arrives monthly, from a dozen directions, and it is designed to never be seen in one place.
EconomicsWrite the Skill, Not the Answer
Solving a problem well and losing the solution is the default. A skill file turns a one-off answer into permanent capability. The structure, and the template.
WorkThe Marathon Session
Agents have no sense of time; ask one to work eight hours and it may finish in twenty. Stop estimating hours, write a real plan, and tell it to run a marathon session to the finish.
WorkThe Mandatory Vacation
Formula 1, the most competitive industry on earth, shuts down completely for two weeks every summer, by rule. Your office could learn from the rulebook.
Formula 1The Gate That Fires Every Time
Telling an AI assistant how you like things works for about an hour. A rule that triggers on an observable signal works indefinitely. The pattern, and the file.
WorkThis Website Runs Itself
This site publishes a post every Sunday, sends the newsletter, and pings search engines with nobody pressing a button. A small, honest case study in spec-driven automation, told through the two nights it broke.
WorkThe Year I Got Myself Back
One year sober, and the surprise was not what I gave up but who I became. An honest note on community, reaction over circumstance, and what I would tell anyone standing on the edge.
PersonalThe Spec That Lints Itself
A small, free, no-dependency script that checks a markdown spec for the gaps that force an AI coding agent to guess. Download it and run it today.
WorkThe Org Chart Lags Reality
With an agent, a lot of a role becomes automatable fast. What holds it up is rarely the technology. It is the organization: the last stretch of a job someone is unwilling to hand over, and a structure built for the old distribution of work.
WorkEurope Is Closed
Every August my European colleagues vanish behind an out-of-office wall while American calendars barely flinch. One of these systems is being honest.
CultureData Products for Robots
AI agents are now first-class consumers of your data. A practical guide to what changes when the reader of your documentation is a machine.
WorkEvaluation Is the New Code Review
In spec-driven development, writing the spec gets the attention. The skill that actually decides quality is evaluation: designing the tests that prove the output is right, which takes domain truth and failure sense at the same time.
WorkOne of My Teams Has No Engineers
I manage four product teams. Three are conventional. The fourth has no engineers: I write the specs and artificial intelligence agents build the software, with a human still reviewing every merge. A field report on what spec-driven development actually changes about the product job.
WorkOpus 5 and the Effort Dial
Near-flagship intelligence at half the price, with a dial for how hard it thinks. The model is no longer the bottleneck. Your specs and checks are.
TechnologyThe Race Is the Deploy
Formula 1 heads into the summer break with half a season down. The races are the part everyone watches, but they are the deploy. The championship is decided in the development war: budget caps, wind tunnel hours, and upgrade strategy. A product person's guide to the sport's real game.
Formula 1The Skills You Didn't See Coming
Spec-driven development is a real, teachable skill, and almost nobody starts with all of it. A map of the four skills it rewards, who sits where, and how any role grows into the work.
WorkThe Next Fifty Years of Entertainment
Going to the movies will become a special occasion, like going to a Broadway play. Home theater, generative content, and live experiences split the entertainment economy along new lines. Predictions for the next half century.
TechnologyWhy Artificial Intelligence Threatens Movies But Not Music
Theaters release about 150 wide films a year. Spotify gets tens of thousands of new songs a day. The supply structure of each industry decides which one artificial intelligence can actually disrupt and which one it can't.
TechnologyWe Thought Retail Was Dead
In the late 1990s, everyone agreed the internet would kill physical retail. Twenty-five years later, brick and mortar still owns 84% of sales. The story of what actually happened is the most useful lens we have for thinking about artificial intelligence right now.
TechnologyI Didn't Leave the Country Until I Was Twenty-Six
The first time I crossed an ocean I was twenty-six. The lessons came in two layers. People are mostly the same. And the United States is its own continent, with the kind of internal variety most travelers cross borders to find.
TravelTrading Isn't About Math
Everyone thinks trading is math. From 2013 to 2016 I worked in high frequency trading and futures coverage. The edge wasn't math. It was world news, poker, and psychology. And the fact that bonds still trade through chat windows tells you why.
MarketsRead Your Own Pre-Read
Letting artificial intelligence summarize the meeting, write the prep, and take the notes feels like a shortcut. The research says it's quietly making us worse at the part of the job that actually matters.
WorkAA Is Great. It's Also Not the Only Way.
I've been sober for almost a year. AA works for a lot of people, and the data is on its side. It's also not the only way, and most of what makes it work has nothing to do with the steps.
HealthThe Tax Complexity Lobby
Americans spend 1.7 billion hours and $31 billion a year doing taxes. That's not an accident. Here are practical ways individuals can route around the lobby that wants to keep it that way.
PolicyThe Best of East and West
Western medicine writes off acupuncture, tai chi, and turmeric as junk science. The peer-reviewed evidence says otherwise. The smart move is to take the best of both traditions, not pick a side.
HealthCovid Rewrote the Dating Rules
The pandemic forced people to invert the typical dating script. Define the relationship first, meet later. The data says it actually worked better.
CultureThe Problem with the Word Smart
When we say someone is smart, we usually mean they remember things and answer questions quickly. That's one kind of intelligence. The research says there are at least seven more, and most of them matter more.
EducationSeven Things Every Religion Figured Out
Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks independently converged on the same breathing rate. That's not theology. That's data. My book is about what it means and what you can do with it.
FaithIs College Worth It?
Tuition has risen 13x since 1980. The average borrower takes 20 years to pay off their loans. But the earnings premium is real. The honest answer depends entirely on what and where you study.
EducationThe Long Road to Representative Leadership
Fortune 500 CEOs are 89% male and overwhelmingly white. At the current rate, demographic parity is decades away. Some of the headlines celebrating progress are actually part of the problem.
LeadershipThe Best Way to Write a Date (And Why Almost Nobody Does It)
There are three ways to write a date. Most of the world picked one, the US picked another, and the objectively correct answer is the one almost nobody uses in conversation.
StandardsThe Junior Role Is Disappearing. What Happens in 25 Years?
Entry-level jobs are vanishing faster than anyone expected. If artificial intelligence replaces the first rung of the career ladder, where will tomorrow's leaders come from?
Future of WorkThe Tipping Problem Nobody Wants to Solve
Restaurants have tried eliminating tips. Servers hated it. But the alternative is a system where 20% of Americans still tip for terrible service. Something has to give.
CultureNuclear Energy Has a Marketing Problem, Not a Safety Problem
Nuclear power causes 99.9% fewer deaths than coal per unit of energy. The Chernobyl death toll was a fraction of what most people believe. So why are we still afraid?
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