Thinking out loud.
Long-form pieces live here first. Some are also published on Medium and Substack — those are listed below with a link out. RSS
Programming, Plainly
The words you write to direct an AI aren't notes — they're source code, in plain language. The instrument in that layer is structure: name the things of your work exactly, and the shape of your information becomes the shape of your control.
Explore the Fold
Everyone building with AI runs a loop. The fold is an answer to what kind — not a loop that resets each morning and climbs toward needing you less, but one that carries, folding each result into the next until the state compounds and the interface built on it keeps getting better, with the person still at the center.
Enter the Fold
Before AI, the programmer's craft was a stack of capabilities — knowing what to build, and the iterative loop toward it. AI has been climbing that stack rung by rung, matching each and then outrunning it, until the last rung: the one that was never a capability at all.
A New Path
Three trades — story, interface, data — turned out to be one job: deciding what gets built. The machine took the typing; the deciding is what's left.
The Inverted Interface
We bolted a non-deterministic machine into an interface built for a deterministic one, then went looking for the trouble in the model. It isn't a tuning problem — it's an interface problem: what do we hand the machine, and what stays ours to decide?