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Building in hard mode.

Unfiltered insights from a builder of products, teams, and organizations for those working in hard mode, with high stakes and no playbook.

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The Paradox of Prudence

StrategyInnovationLeadership & Culture

The decisions that stagnate growing businesses aren't the bad ones; rather, they're a series of individually smart ones that never compound.

Read the essay Aug 02, 2026 · 6 min read

Topics

Curated reading paths. Start with the anchor, read in order.

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Topic · 3 essays

Adaptive Software

  1. Code Over Config
  2. Layered Context: An Adaptive Memory Architecture for Agents
  3. Action Architecture: How Agents Act Safely
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Topic · 4 essays

AI Acceleration

  1. Why You're Not Seeing the Gains From AI
  2. Few Companies Know What AI Transformation Means
  3. The Supercomputer in the Corner
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Topic · 5 essays

Innovation Architecture

  1. The Incumbent's Dilemma: Why disrupting yourself is hard
  2. Paramedics, ER, and Surgeons: How to Structure 0→1 Teams for Speed & Certainty
  3. The Disruptor's Paradox: How Great Innovators Become Incrementalists...and What to Do About It
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Recent

107 posts
AIBuilding with AI

Action Architecture: How Agents Act Safely

We've explored on this blog, systems that have a memory architecture, and how we can update that memory architecture to effectively "learn". Now, we explore how we can let agents run unsupervised safely. This is the final piece in the adaptive software architecture.

Jul 22, 2026 5 min read
AIAgentic Engineering

Sky's the Limit: a hands-on guide to agentic engineering

I recently introduced the "AI Adoption Continuum", that maps the proficiency of people & orgs. It uses a transportation metaphor, going from walking all the way to flying rockets. This tutorial aims to get you from "ground transportation" to "airborne" by showing how to build agent harnesses.

Jun 27, 2026 2 min read
Opinion & PersonalCulture

In Defense of Banality

In a culture obsessed with optimizing every minute, we've started treating enjoyments like spectator sports and comedy as a waste of time. That's exactly backwards; these 'banalities' are the essential infrastructure of a functioning society.

Jun 26, 2026 6 min read

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