Vouching
Unlike other languages, English has no grammatical way to mark where your information came from. So we've built a colorful and extensive vocabulary for the people who exploit that loophole.
Catching up / Nuremberg funnels
Yikes. I was doing so well. My New Years resolution was to start this new blog, and then post weekly. I got into March without missing a week. (Well, actually, I started late and then missed a couple weeks, but I always backfilled them before too much time passed.) Then
Practical tips for getting on the same page with AI
Over the last few months, I've gone through a shift in how I interact with AI agents—especially coding agents, Claude/ChatGPT chats, and Cowork sessions. I'm no longer thinking primarily in terms of instructions. Instead, I'm thinking in terms of a more abstract
What to do with your plans when the code is done
Spec-driven development is having a moment. In a nutshell: coding agents are much more likely to build the right thing if you write a detailed plan upfront. This has worked beautifully for me, and it shows up in the data. Over the last couple months, I've gone
Alignment is shifting from art to science
IMO, "do we have a shared mental model?" is one of the most powerful questions you can have in your mental toolkit. It's crucial for engineering, design, branding, relationships, teamwork, science, law, economics, markets, war, etc. It's the more practical cousin of the Turing
A timeboxed lit review on the science of meetings
Everybody's talking about how AI is changing the tech industry. It seems obvious to me that AI is also going to change the social architecture of organizations. How could it not? Organizations as we know them today have evolved to be productive agglomerations of social apes, with all
Autocatalytic
All this business about OpenClaw reminds me of a concept I learned in grad school: autcatalytic sets (aka hypercycles). An autocatalytic reaction or process is one where the product itself acts as a catalyst for the reaction that produces it — meaning the reaction accelerates as it proceeds, because more product
Advice for a productive sabbatical
About this time last year, I went on sabbatical. This was my first time taking an extended break from full time work, so I asked for advice from anyone who'd taken time off work for one reason or another. The advice I got was awesome: a tossed salad
In defense of "strong opinions weakly held"
I think it's a shame that the practice of "strong opinions weakly held" is so controversial. It's not surprising, I suppose. The term has been badly misappropriated and misinterpreted. But the original concept is powerful: I have found that the fastest way to an
Subjective measures
In days of yore, an "acre" was the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plow in a day. I love that today, a "sprint" is the amount of code that a team of engineers can complete in (about) two weeks. Totally subjective and context-
Biographies I read in 2025
I spend more time reading[1] historical biographies than any other genre. Speculative fiction is a close second. Here's a list of all the biographies I read in 2025. (Summaries are generated from content on Amazon/Goodreads by Claude) My favorites were Putin, Eleanor, and Feynman, because they
Why a newsletter?
I'm a big believer in cultivating serendipity. The universe wants to be generous to us, but it's constrained by our level of openness to unexpected experiences / ideas / connections / gifts / etc. One way great way to cultivate serendipity is by being curious in public. I've