Library

Documents meant to be useful on their own — the standards I work by, and records of what building this way actually looks like. Listed by year. The archive starts now.

Index10 documents

2026

Write the check firstName who the work is for, what changes for them, and the check that would prove it - before you build.Aug 175 min read Understand, plan, execute, verifyThe working loop I use for any non-trivial task, and why quality and speed stop trading off once work has a shape.Aug 175 min read The stranger testHand your work to someone with zero context and let them reconstruct what it's for. The gaps are the defects.Aug 175 min read The arrival testKnowledge that exists but doesn't reach you at the moment of need is dead. Here's how I test whether it arrives - and the near-outage that made me build the test.Aug 176 min read My engineering team is a fleet of AI agentsMost days my engineering team is AI agents. What makes that work is not the models. It's measurement, enforcement, and refusing to take an agent's word for anything.Aug 175 min read Job search is an information problemMost job-search pain gets billed as a motivation problem or a skills problem. It is mostly neither. It is an information asymmetry.Aug 175 min read I measured 47 days of talking to AI agents2.4 million words of agent output, 2,724 of my own replies, Fisher-tested. Two findings survived. Two of my own headline claims did not - and the retractions are the useful part.Aug 175 min read Green lights that lieThe anatomy of verification signals that pass while the thing is broken, and how to build checks that can't.Aug 176 min read Build it, prove it, scale itThe three acts behind the slogan, each with its own failure mode: demos, experiments, and liabilities.Aug 175 min read Keep a ValueA standard for stating what shipped work changed, and how to check it.Aug 161 min read