/ field notes
late notes from the studio.
fashion, music, design, sport, sales, then software. the rooms changed; the discipline didn't. taste is a learnt craft and it transfers. notes from inside real builds. no gated content, no email wall.
frontier intelligence: race to the bottom?
mind-numbing tool or amplifier is the wrong question. on slop, the magic-box trap, and why the real skill gap was never technical vs non-technical.
graph engineering
loop engineering was last season. the layer above it: not how the work improves on each pass, but what is allowed to happen next.
loop engineering
the craft of building agents that run on a loop unattended: external verification, stopping rules, heartbeats, and alerts that carry the action.
model rot, and other quiet failures
the dangerous failure in an ai system is the quiet one: retired model ids, fabricated green data, and "done" claims nobody verified.
ai without the hype
what people think ai is vs what it actually does in school, workflows, design and builds. the divider is never the tool.
on taste, and how to spot its absence
a practical list of the tells that give away generic ai output, and what real taste looks like instead.
build it. ship it. move on.
why we work to a fixed scope, why the team stays small, and what "finished" actually means.