Essays
All articles
Thoughts on software, productivity, and the slow work of figuring out how to live well.
What's actually true about AI data centers?
AI data centers use real electricity and water, but the useful debate depends on location, cooling, grid impact, waste heat, and who benefits.
Why aren't we 3D printing more boats?
Boats are expensive because boatbuilding is slow, manual, and tooling-heavy. Large-format 3D printing may help first with molds and prototypes.
Sauna Is Getting Harder to Ignore
The strongest sauna evidence points to frequent Finnish-style sauna use, but humidity, core temperature, timing, and fertility caveats all change the practical dose.
AI-native pods are the startup advantage inside companies
Brian Armstrong's Coinbase memo points to a bigger shift in org design: small AI-native pods that move with startup speed inside larger companies.
People Are Vibe-Coding Their Own Productivity Games
AI coding tools are making personalized productivity software cheap enough to build for one person's brain. That may extend the long tail of niche software.
Digital Gravity: How Small Founders Build Inescapable Brands with AI
Digital gravity is how small founders create enough useful surface area that buyers, mentions, links, and inbound leads start orbiting them.
The SaaS Directory Submission Guide That Doesn't Charge You $300
Directory submissions aren't dead — they're just easy to do badly. Here's the short list of directories that actually matter, what to prepare, and why most founders do this wrong.
Memory & Task Systems: Giving Your AI Agent a Brain
Context windows are finite and sessions don't persist. Here's the three-tier memory system I built to make my AI agent actually learn over time.
Everyone's Building AI Farms. Here's What They're Missing.
Compute was never the bottleneck. After months of running AI agents as real work infrastructure, here's what actually matters — and what the Mac Studio crowd is overlooking.
The Skills That Actually Matter in the Age of AI
Perishable skills decay. Non-perishable skills compound. Here's the framework I use to figure out which is which — and the 6 skills I'm betting on.
I Quit My PM Job 6 Months Ago — Here's What Actually Happened
I left a comfortable PM role to build my own thing. Six months in — what's worked, what's been harder than expected, and why I'd do it again.
How Stripe Turned 7 Lines of Code Into a $107 Billion Company
How two brothers from rural Ireland simplified online payments and built Stripe into a $107 billion financial infrastructure giant.