Letters

Field notes on shipping AI, going forward-deployed, and the messy middle of solo building. Roughly monthly. No filler.

20Letters

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2026Since

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The Citation That Was Never Fetched

Four research agents returned sixty-three rows, each with a source URL. Thirty of them rested on a search-result snippet, and nothing in the output could tell you which thirty.

Sep 12, 2026

The Fixes I Said I Made

An audit found thirteen problems. I reported twelve fixed. A second pass could only confirm ten, and the two it could not confirm were the two nobody would ever look at.

Sep 5, 2026

The Control Row

I built a harness to measure what my decorative CSS actually costs. Three of eight runs were garbage, and the only reason I know that is a toggle that does nothing.

Aug 9, 2026

The Threshold That Always Fires

I had a rule for vendor concentration that triggered on day one and every day after. A rule that always returns the same answer is not a rule.

Aug 2, 2026

The Check That Lied

A shell fallback turned a command failure into a confident "not found", and I almost deleted a repo over it.

Jul 26, 2026

Scenario Pages Over Feature Pages

The landing page that ranks is not the one that describes what you built. It is the one that answers the exact sentence a person typed into a search box.

Jul 19, 2026

You Can't Generate a UI Demo

Generative video is astonishing at photographs and useless at interfaces. This week I finally wrote down where the line is and why it matters.

Jul 12, 2026

The Dependency That Killed It

A project I had archived came back to life this week. Not by fixing what broke, but by deleting the ambitious part that broke it.

Jul 5, 2026

The Cyrillic Typography Trap

A "premium" display typeface looked gorgeous, until I typed a real heading in Russian. The fix taught me to test tokens against real language, not Latin filler.

Jun 28, 2026

Done Isn't Shipped

Three of my open-source projects were tested-green and unshipped at the same time. The gap between them was one command I kept deferring.

Jun 21, 2026

Deciding a Visual Direction in Parallel Worktrees

When two design directions both look plausible on paper, stop arguing and build both in branches you can actually look at side by side.

Jun 10, 2026

Enforcement Is the Moat

I built a memory system for AI coding agents. Then a 2M-sub channel gave away the structural pattern free. The release that followed taught me which parts of the system were actually mine.

May 20, 2026