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 from
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
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
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
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
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
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-dependent.
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
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