There was once a wizard who lived beside a pond. It was a small pond. The sort of pond that probably gets called a “water feature” on a Zillow listing by a real estate agent who really knows their euphemisms. The wizard loved it. “This,” he said, “is my moat.” The villagers looked at the pond. A frog blinked. “It is a pond,” said the baker. “It is proprietary,” said the wizard. The baker nodded, b

Note: I just enabled paid subscriptions for $8/month. Most of these essays will still be free, but I’m working on adding premium features to Artifact Land and launching a hosted version of Conjure among other upcoming products that will come with the subscription. I’m planning on increasing the price as the bundle grows. So upgrade your subscription now to lock in the intro price. Ok… picture this

There is a photograph of a coral reef on the wall of my dentist’s office. It’s a good photograph. Technically impressive, the fish are crisp. I’ve stared at it and imagined I was snorkeling with them at basically every cleaning since he put it up. But as my jaw starts to ache, I’m reminded of the core feature that makes it a photograph. I cannot swim into it. I cannot change the angle. I cannot wa

Penn & Teller have this philosophy about their craft. Or, I guess, all stage magicians do, but Penn & Teller are the ones who spend the most time talking about it. They will spend months on a single trick. Years, sometimes. More time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect, they’ve said. The same motion. The same timing. The same angle of the wrist at the exact same millisecond. Elim

You had a technique. Don’t pretend you didn’t. Everyone had a technique. Three short breaths, then one long one. Or two long breaths across the whole cartridge on either side. Or you put it in your shirt and blew through it like I did. You knew yours was the right one because it worked , and you could prove it, because the game started right up every time. Want to know what was actually happening?

Your Free Tier is Someone Else's Twenty-Minute Side Project So try explaining freemium to someone who’s never heard of it. You build a thing. A whole thing. Then you give away part of it. The worst part. On purpose. And you hope that the people using the worst part of your thing will eventually want the better parts badly enough to pay you. This is the foundation of a trillion-dollar industry. It

The End of Feedback There’s a seed library at the community center near my house. Or there was. The way it worked: you’d take a packet of tomato seeds, grow your tomatoes, save some seeds from your best plants, and bring them back. Then last year, something changed. People started dropping off bags and bags of seeds. They all got those new bulk seed generators that had gotten cheap enough for anyo

On Saturday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts. On Sunday I wrote about what happens when a fundamental input gets cheap and new categories of activity explode in ways nobody predicts. I teased, at the end, that I’d been writing science fiction about what life looks like on the other side of that explosion.

On Pizzas, CSVs, and Building for Markets That Don't Exist Yet Jim Barksdale, not the guy from The Wire (that was Avon), the Netscape guy. Before your time maybe. Definitely before mine in any meaningful sense. He said once that basically there are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling. That’s it. That’s the whole theory of business. Everything is either getting stitched

There’s this talk from 1997 that I keep bringing up on here, but there’s a different part I want to call to your attention this time. Alan Kay, standing in front of a room of programmers, talking about dog houses. “You take any random boards, nail and hammer, pound them together and you’ve got a structure that will stay up. You don’t have to know anything except how to pound a nail to do that.” So

Or: Documents Retrieved from the Department of Best Practices, Third Sub-Basement, The Building The following materials were recovered from a decommissioned Slack workspace. The workspace itself was migrated to a new platform six hours after these documents were created. The new platform has since been deprecated. We have preserved them here for historical purposes. We realize “historical” may not

Or: The Beaver Who Learned To Measure Twice There’s a beaver who lives upstream from here. You probably haven’t met him. He’s quite particular about guests. This beaver builds dams. That’s what beavers do. But this beaver kept building dams that... well… One collapsed in spring. One leaked from seventeen places at once. One was structurally perfect but faced the wrong direction and created a pond

There’s a mass of data that holds a shape you can’t quite name. You poke it with a stick. It responds. You poke it differently. Different response. You start to get a feel for it, not understanding exactly, but something adjacent to understanding. A sense of what it wants to be. That’s kind of where I am right now. The Lens I Brought First, a little bit about my background, because it explains why

Looking Back on 2025 I didn’t mean to start a newsletter. I mean, I did, technically. You don’t accidentally sign up for Substack and accidentally write things and accidentally click publish. There’s intention in there somewhere. But the newsletter I ended up with wasn’t the newsletter I thought I was making. It was supposed to be demos. Short videos showing that the AI stuff actually worked. “Her

Michelangelo supposedly said the statue already existed in the marble, he simply removed everything that wasn't David. As the story goes, Jeff Bezos is sitting somewhere in 1994, probably in a garage or a warehouse or wherever people had ideas before they had LLMs, and he realizes something important about the internet. Shelf space is now free. Not cheap. Not affordable. Free. In a physical bookst

It's like BDD, but the user is a hallucination We’ve been lying to ourselves about our tests for years. We’ve been telling ourselves we’re “testing what users do” while secretly giving our tests superpowers no user has ever possessed. Perfect memory of every CSS class. Instant knowledge of every button’s location. The ability to click things that are technically visible but practically invisible.

Architectural Control at Agent Velocity A few weeks ago Justin and I went to a hackathon at Google. Not a “use our cloud API” hackathon. A “we literally shipped a small language model with Chrome and you can use it locally” hackathon. Let me say that again: Chrome. Has. An. LLM. Built. In. The same browser that you’re probably reading this post in is now shipping with a language model. They call i

Why We Still Need Frameworks When AI Can Build Everything Hallucinations - 01 A master carpenter kept worn wooden jigs in his workshop—templates smoothed by ten thousand cuts, guides that knew the exact curve of comfort. A brilliant apprentice arrived with a programmable machine. "Master, why keep these old blocks? My machine can cut any shape imaginable." The master handed her rough lumber. "Make

There's this restaurant in Tokyo that doesn't have a kitchen. Well, it has a kitchen, but nobody cooks in it anymore. It started when the owner got tired of explaining to his chefs how to make his grandmother's miso soup exactly right. So he built a machine that could make it perfectly every time. Then another machine for the rice. Another for the tempura. Soon, the whole kitchen was machines. The

On Sessions, Dreams, and the Art of Parallel Agentic Programming So we’ve all heard about that parallel universes theory that physicists get all excited about, right? Well, I doubt many of them have used tmux, so how much can they really tell us about actually living in multiple realities at once? I've been doing this dance for almost 15 years now. Fifteen. That's longer than some JavaScript frame