Log
Technical articles and lessons from a decade of building web applications.
· 7 min read
Your Agent's Persona Is Making It Worse
I spent six weeks building an orchestrator that treats personas as constraint sets, not job titles. Here's what changed and why.
· 4 min read
The newsletter you signed up for doesn't exist anymore
It split in two. Same subscription, two tracks — one for what I'm building, one for what I think about the industry. No action required.
· 9 min read
Stop Running Your Agents
A Reddit post about a 3-agent Claude team hit 427 upvotes and 226 stars in 3 days. The pattern is right. The gap it leaves is the interesting part.
· 17 min read
From 7,415 Lines of Bash to a Personal Intelligence OS
How Via evolved across four generations in 87 days — from Redis polling loops to a 40-skill orchestration engine with 55,000 lines of Go.
· 6 min read
How I Automated My Entire Substack Workflow
From drafting articles to scheduling notes to engaging with readers. One system runs all of it.
· 9 min read
Multi-Agent Orchestration Is Solving the Wrong Problem
The HN wave of 'agents as teammates' assumes the team metaphor improves output. The production data suggests it improves comprehension instead.
· 9 min read
Most Agent Failures Aren't Reasoning Failures
97% of a subprocess output vanished between runs, and it took two weeks to realize every bad agent decision traced back to context, not cognition.
· 9 min read
541 Hours of Claude Code in 20 Days
82% success rate sounds great until you examine the 18% — entire sessions lost to context limits, wrong approaches, and one mission that generated 1.7GB of garbage output.
· 8 min read
Isolation as Configuration
Claude Code's worktree support isn't a workflow convenience — it's the first declarative isolation primitive in multi-agent coding tooling, and it changes what parallel execution actually means.
· 8 min read
Your CLAUDE.md Is Making Things Worse
A newly published study found that LLM-generated context files hurt task completion and raise costs by 20%. The harder question is when they still make sense.
· 9 min read
Why the Decomposer Always Picks Backend-Engineer
83 of 275 phases in Via's mission history were assigned to backend-engineer — 30.2% of all decomposed work. The second-place persona got 36. Here's why that gap exists and what it costs.
· 7 min read
The Platform Came Last
I didn't design Via as a platform and then write plugins for it. I built nine CLI tools that each solved one problem, and the platform was what emerged when they needed to talk to each other.
· 8 min read
How the Orchestrator Actually Works: 7 Packages, 4,570 Lines, Zero Magic
I typed orchestrator run and watched three agents spin up in parallel, each writing to its own directory, none aware the others existed. This is the 4,570-line Go system that makes that work.
· 10 min read
MCPs Are Dead. CLIs Won.
A Hacker News post declared the protocol wars over. I've been building on that thesis for months — 175 missions, 9 plugins, zero MCPs. Here's what I actually learned.
· 8 min read
My AI Agent's Memory System Was 60% Dead
I audited Via's five memory layers against Google's memory taxonomy. Three hooks silently failed. MEMORY.md was structurally bypassed. Only one layer — the learnings database — was actually persisting knowledge across sessions.
· 11 min read
The Vampiric Effect
I shipped an 847-line PR on a Wednesday night and couldn't recall a single architectural decision the next morning. The output was mine. The understanding wasn't.
· 12 min read
The #1 Thing My AI Agents Learned Wasn't Code
I built a system that captures what AI agents learn across 175 missions. The most-used learning — retrieved 247 times — isn't a code pattern. It's a publishing decision.
· 7 min read
What Building a Product Alone Teaches You
A creator platform I designed and built solo — from database schema to deployment. What wearing every hat on a real product actually teaches you.
· 6 min read
Three Tools I Built Because Someone on the Team Was Stuck
A CS team that couldn't reproduce bugs, QAs blocked by stale cache, and translations that wouldn't update. Three frustrations, three tools.
· 8 min read
What Nobody Tells You About Migrating a Live Trading Platform
What it's actually like to modernize a live trading platform when you can't break anything and you're the only frontend dev.
· 7 min read
Eight Months Old and Already Load-Bearing
I built my thesis on Docker 0.8. The tool barely existed. The instinct I built using it has never stopped.
· 7 min read
The Patterns From My First Job
A remote hire in the Philippines, inheriting an existing product. Four inconsistent APIs on a client project I wasn't supposed to be building. Docker before anyone in the room believed in it. The patterns that formed before I had words for them.