Agency
Methods, workflows, tools, and practical empowerment
16 posts
Finding the Seam
When your tool can't do what you need, the move isn't to replace it — it's to find the one assumption you can override.
Build Three, Pick One
When generation is nearly free, planning is no longer cheaper than building. The smart move: write the tests, build three implementations, and let measurement replace speculation.
The Friction That Carries Meaning
When AI polishes your writing, it systematically removes the parts that diverge from the training distribution. The deletions are the most interesting part.
Familiarity Beats Cleverness
A custom format designed to save tokens consumed 738% more of them at scale. The lesson isn't about YAML — it's about what happens when you optimize against the grain of the substrate.
Skills as Composable Units
Your expertise has a shape. A de facto standard is emerging for packaging agent capabilities—and it means you can solve problems once and carry them forward forever.
The Taste Artifact
Your codebase is already teaching your AI agents. The question isn't whether you're teaching—it's whether you're teaching what you mean to.
Liberating Trapped Data
You own documents you can't search. Data you can see but can't use. The coherentist move: build the extraction pipeline once and stop paying friction tax forever.
The Usability Inflection Point for Sandboxing
Sandboxing has been possible for decades. Now it's forgettable—and that's when infrastructure starts to matter.
The Transcript as Work Product
The distinction between doing work and documenting work is collapsing. The transcript is the artifact.
The Maintenance Threshold
We rarely ask the question that actually determines survival: What will this cost me to keep running?
The Model That Doesn't Phone Home
Capable AI models now run entirely in your browser. No API keys, no accounts, no vendor dependency. That changes the calculus of what you can build.
When Building Gets Fast, Saying No Gets Harder
AI-assisted development accelerates MVP creation, but speed increases feature creep pressure rather than reducing it. The bottleneck shifts from implementation to focus.
Draw the Line Before You Need It: Trust Boundaries in AI Work
Netflix's AI principles define what AI can touch and what stays human. These aren't technical constraints—they're trust boundaries.
Structure as Signal: When Codebases Talk to Agents
Codebases optimized for human reading miss what agents need most: explicit structure, clear signals, and self-documenting architecture.
Custody, Not Just Convenience
Managed services promise to handle everything for you. Sometimes the real cost is what you can't see until it's already gone.
The Constraints We Inherit Are Not the Constraints We Face
Modal editing exists because terminals in the 1970s couldn't handle modifier keys. We kept the modes. The terminals are gone.