The archive

Every essay, in one place. Browse by tag or year, or search the full text - the URL holds your selection, so any view is shareable.

7 total essays 8 tags since 2026

6 essays match

Sep 3, 2026

A four-story brick apartment building with every window lit and plants in the window boxes, beside an empty dirt lot where a yellow crawler crane holds its wrecking ball drawn back, an instant before swinging into the building. A single brick and a rolled-up drawing lie in the dirt.

Things You Should Never Do, Revisited

Joel Spolsky told a generation of engineers to never rewrite from scratch. Twenty-six years later, with agents that can read and rewrite a codebase in days, does the advice still hold?

Aug 13, 2026

Wooden artist's mannequins in a chain of marionettes: a large kneeling figure holds the strings of a smaller one, which holds the strings of a smaller one still, down to a tiny figure drawing a line across a sheet of paper on the floor.

What Open Weights Mean - The Three Weeks That Followed Kimi K3

Kimi K3's weights landed right on schedule - into a federal distillation accusation, an industry-wide open letter, and the first autonomous AI cyberattack. Part 3 of the K3 series looks at what came next.

Jul 24, 2026

Four cartoon islands of the same shape on deep teal water: one lush and fully built out with a cottage, fountain, and lamp posts; one frozen mid-construction with exposed wooden framing; one overgrown with tangled vines; one small and plain but complete.

One Prompt, Four Models - Which AI Is the Better Game Developer?

I gave the same game-dev prompt to Kimi K3, GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5, and Claude Fable 5 - same machine, same rules, native harnesses - then played what came back. Part 2 of the Kimi K3 series.

Jul 22, 2026

A crowd in black silhouette holds up dozens of glowing phones, each screen showing the launch they are all filming: a chrome rocket marked with a black K climbing into a starry night sky on a pillar of white flame above billowing amber smoke.

The Moonshot Moment - Kimi K3's launch week

Kimi K3 launched last week to a flood of hot takes and hyperbole. What the benchmarks, the token economics, and a few identity probes actually say about the newest open-weight moment - part 1 of a three-part series.

Jul 13, 2026

Socrates in an olive robe leans forward mid-argument, one finger raised, while a small deadpan gray robot seated on a marble plinth holds out a finished scroll; three scrolls lie on the marble floor between them, beneath a terracotta fresco in a columned hall.

How I Work With Agents

A mandatory workshop in February put me back into hands-on engineering and changed how I work. These are the practices I've learned from countless hours with agents since - most of them useful well beyond coding.

Jul 6, 2026

An open wooden collector's case lined with green velvet, holding an abacus, a slide rule, and a vintage pocket calculator in fitted recesses, beside a smooth uncut section where a fourth instrument would go.

The Calculator Replaced the Slide Rule - Math Didn't Die

In 1972 the HP-35 made the slide rule obsolete almost overnight, but math didn't die. AI is doing the same thing to software engineering, and the fundamentals are getting more valuable, not less.