Innovation Matters
Essays on AI, developer tools, and thoughtful software.
Don't confuse a demo with a product
AI can turn a prompt into polished software in an afternoon. The result looks finished, which makes one crucial question dangerously easy to skip.
AI makes building cheap, ownership is still expensive
Your coding agent can replace that SDK in twenty minutes. But what happens during the years that follow?
Does every agent skill need an eval?
A skill can make an agent better and still be a bad trade. How much evidence should you expect before trusting someone else's skill?
What's volatile about your technology?
A model's knowledge cutoff doesn't tell you how old its knowledge of your SDK is. Technology providers know something more useful.
Your agent should start with a hypothesis, not a plan
Agents can turn a plausible first answer into a plan before current documentation gets a say. By then, correcting an outdated assumption is already expensive.