MY TESLA SWERVED AROUND A STAIN. OUR CAMERA CALLED IT A FIRE.
This morning my car flinched at nothing—a dried stain on dry asphalt—because its neural network learned to avoid patterns that look like hazards without understanding what a hazard actually is.
THE CADENCE THAT RUNS MY BUILDS
Andrew Ng's letter on loop engineering gave a name to something I'd been feeling but couldn't articulate—three nested loops running at minutes, hours, and days, each feeding the next.
THE PRD GOT LONGER. IT SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN SHARPER
AI made PRDs longer, not sharper, burying the one thing developers actually need to know under thirty other things they don't.
HOW FAR DOWN WILL YOU POINT THE QUESTION
My 83-year-old father told me that philosophy transcends science, theology transcends philosophy, and at high complexity, the three intertwine—and I've been turning it over ever since.
MOVING COMPUTE TO THE EDGE DOESN'T MEAN MOVING THE BUSINESS MODEL BACKWARDS
A business model should follow the value delivered to the customer, not where the engineering happened to run.
THE BELL ALMOST MADE ME CRY
The bell is one minute. The two decades behind it are the real achievement, and almost no one sees them. On watching the SpaceX IPO, the goals worth keeping, and why I'm still walking.
I'M BRINGING FIGMA BACK
I told every PM to stop writing specs for designers and start shipping working prototypes instead. No Figma, no mockup-to-code handoff — Engineering builds straight from the prototype. The PMs took to vibe coding fast. The designers struggled, and the reason they struggled taught me something about where AI-native workflows actually break. Here's what I changed, and the one hard rule that keeps the fix honest.
GRAPH THINKING FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS: WHAT A GRAPH DATABASE TAUGHT ME ABOUT PRODUCT STRATEGY
Our chief scientist argued that modeling subscriptions as a graph instead of rigid tables would simplify the architecture and maximize flexibility, and I couldn't shake the feeling that he was onto something.
RETHINKING AI AGENTS AFTER TWO SHARP CHALLENGES
Agency is a budget you allocate across the layers of your system, not a switch you flip.
AN AI AGENT IS A TOOL THAT DECIDES
Two years after defining AI Agents through a sense-act loop, the term has been diluted by marketing—real agents make decisions, not just follow workflows.
IDEAS ARE CHEAP? THINK AGAIN
Ideas are cheap? That's what I've told people for twenty years. A thousand people have your idea, a hundred start building, ten ship, one succeeds — so stop being precious and just execute. AI is making me rethink that. When App Store submissions surge 84% in a single quarter and anyone can ship a product in a weekend, execution is no longer the scarce resource. Judgment is. Here's my updated framework.
ON BUILDING THINGS
After decades of building technology products, I've come to believe the hardest part was never the technology itself.
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