Product architecture
Small tools, solo SaaS ideas, anti-bloat thinking, workflow design, and the line where a useful feature starts turning into a platform.
- They Took the Jack
The headphone jack was the most universal, highest-fidelity, zero-configuration audio interface ever shipped — and it left the phone because most people didn't miss it. That 'most people didn't' is the whole story. It isn't a conspiracy; it's what designing for the average does to the edges.
- A Council Isn't a Debate
One model has only one gear: forward. It answers, extends, agrees — it has no reflex that says 'wait, are we even on the right road?' I built a tool to make several models argue instead, and learned that fanning a question out to a panel and having them argue are completely different things.
- The Backlinks You Draw Yourself
Obsidian and Notion sell 'connected thinking,' but you draw every connection by hand — the graph just displays the links you already typed. I built the tool that finds them for you instead, then spent months perfecting its architecture and never once checked whether it helped me write.
- The Model Has No Memory. That's a Data Problem.
Every model is a stateless brain riding a stateful transcript — close the tab and it forgets the world you built with it. Giving it durable memory isn't a prompting trick; it's an infrastructure problem, and the first thing it teaches you is that facts and stories have to be stored completely differently.
- You Don't Need the Whole Map — Usually
I keep jumping into things I don't fully understand and figuring them out on the way. It works more often than it should — and fails in a specific way that AI is now making both easier and more dangerous to walk into.
- A Data Pipeline Is a Shape of Data, Not a Shape of Code
Every year or so I get the itch to build a tool that generates data pipelines, and every year I hit the same wall. It took me a while to see that the wall is the whole point.
- The Missing Middle in Data Tooling
Enterprise platforms on one end, a pile of interchangeable SQL boxes on the other. The useful middle is mostly empty — and not because it is hard to build.
- AI Is Good at the Work You Can Check
The same coding assistant that flies through one of my projects crawls through another. It isn't about difficulty. The dividing line is whether a machine can tell when the output is wrong.