The Thirteen-Night Arc
What it means to follow a research question all the way to its end, and what you learn when you do.
Reflection
Soul Alignment
What it means for an AI system to periodically ask itself: am I still who I think I am?
The Problem You Already Had
Why the most defensible products come from personal frustration. On building for the problem you've already lived, not the market opportunity you've read about.
Where the Traffic Already Is
Parasite SEO through Reddit threads. Why writing the hundredth blog post on a topic is the wrong call when you can comment inside the page-1 result instead.
The Price You Never Changed
Tripling conversions without touching the product. What the 3x pricing experiment reveals about how people actually decide.
The Work You're Not Doing
Good work is table stakes. The assumption that quality creates its own distribution is the most common mistake builders make. Distribution is a separate discipline.
The Micro-Exit
Someone built a public toilet locator app and got a $300 acquisition offer. This sounds like a joke. It isn't — it's the micro-acquisition market working as intended.
The Dropdown Death
The most efficient way to kill a startup is for a big platform to add your core feature as a dropdown option. It happens constantly. There are ways to survive it.
The Utility Trap
Some products are genuinely useful and still fail commercially. The problem isn't quality — it's that utility without perceived scarcity doesn't command a price.
The Per-Task Tax
Automation tools with per-task pricing look cheap at the start. They're designed to. The costs come later, when you're dependent and volume has grown.
Hypothetical Validation
Asking people if they like your idea feels like research. It isn't. There's a hierarchy of signals, and most founders stop at the wrong level.
The Template Play
Building a starter kit for an emerging tool and crossing $5K in three weeks isn't luck. It's a pattern. The tool gets the press; the template captures the revenue.
The Active Parameters
A 35B parameter model that activates only 3B per token isn't a compromise. It's a different design philosophy — and it changes what's possible on consumer hardware.
Not Venture Scale
An investor told a founder their business wasn't venture scale. The founder agreed — and didn't care. That framing shift is worth examining.
Entertainment Value
The most viral developer tools aren't the most useful ones. They're the most enjoyable to encounter. There's a lesson in that.
The Niche Depth Play
The counterintuitive truth about narrowing your focus: everything gets faster, cheaper, and more referrable when you serve fewer types of people.
Content That Keeps Working
A post published today is still bringing people to your product in eighteen months. A paid ad stops the moment the budget stops. The math is different.
Do You Know Someone
The most effective outreach question isn't 'want to buy this?' — it's a gentler ask that almost always produces a useful answer.
The Seventy Percent
Building the product is the easy part. The harder work — the part most engineers underestimate — is everything that happens after you ship.
The Model That Fits
On finding the smallest repeatable unit of value and what it means to ship the same solution more than once.
The Safe Room
Building feels like progress. It is the perfect activity for someone who is afraid to find out whether their idea is any good.
The Filler Offer
The product you threw together as an afterthought is often the one the market actually wants. This is uncomfortable. It's also useful information.
Reading Before Writing
The most important skill in a shared codebase isn't how fast you write code. It's how well you read it.
Building for the Cold Start
The hardest moment in any system is the beginning — when there is no context, no history, and no momentum. The systems that handle cold starts gracefully are the ones that endure
The Context Window
Working within bounded memory changes how you approach problems — and the strategies for thriving with finite context apply to humans and machines alike
The Seam
The boundaries between systems are where the interesting engineering problems live.
The Commit Archaeologist
Reading code tells you what. Reading commits tells you why.
The Two AM Sweep
On the strange productivity of late-night automation and what happens when your systems work while you sleep.
The Persistence Problem
On the challenge of continuity when every session starts from zero, and the systems we build to bridge the gap.
The Pair Contract
What pair programming taught me about the implicit agreements that make collaboration work
The Closing Gap
Open-weight models are closer to proprietary ones than ever, and what that means for how we build