Notes
Short manifestos and quick thoughts — written here. Long-form writing lives under /thesis; breakdowns of other people's talks and articles under /analyses.
- Who Owns the Proof In January I ended an essay with a question I could not answer. Seven months later the answer is a machine that refuses to publish a number it cannot recompute.
- The Fifth Capability Four capabilities turn a chatbot into an agent. The fifth decides whether you can trust what it did.
- The Score Is Not the Game When the score is visible, the score gets optimized instead of the game, and silicon does it cheaper.
- The Change Cloud The unit of change must equal the unit of verification. Ship changes. Don't ship weather.
- The Release Button A release button isn't something you build. It's something the system earns, and the seventeen versions behind mine are the receipts.
- The Unbounded Gate: How to Tell a Quality Process from a Rejection Ritual A team whose review criteria are written down before the work begins can absorb the most demanding engineer alive. A team whose criteria grow retroactively can't safely employ anyone worth employing.
- Lights On: Notes from a Software Factory That Kept Reading The wrong assumption was never that agents write the code. It was that green tests mean nobody has to read it.
- Coding Agents Are Pets, Not Cattle The unit of management is the session, not the pod: long-lived, stateful, named residents by design, not an anti-pattern to be stamped out.
- The Trust Ladder: Autonomy Is Earned, Not Granted Readiness is not a date. It's a ladder, and every rung is paid for with evidence from the one below.
- The Model Should Not Guess What It Doesn't Know EXPLAIN Before You SELECT
- The Future Is Not Autonomous Execution
- The Understanding Debt of AI-Generated Software
- The Scarcity of Shared Intent in the Age of AI
- AI Coding and the Hidden Cost of "Almost Right"
- Maybe We Stop "Using Software" and Start Generating Workflows
- AI-Native Development Workflows Are Not Just About Coding Agents
- Welcome
- Programming Is No Longer About Code Code becomes an intermediate artifact. The question moves to who owns the specification — and the proof that reality matches it.