The collected writing
Archive
Ideas, observations and the occasional tangent.
2026
- This Is Fine
- The latest incarnation of saarthi
- A cave under the house
- Nobody Home: AI Agents and Blindsight
- Living Below the API
- Is Software Engineering a Dead End?
- What Is a Software Engineer Now?
- Rest in Git, Little Buddy
- When AI Agents Go Rogue
- Is Software Engineering Still a Viable Career?
- The Frontier Model Tax
- The Box Might Not Hold
- The Toyota Tundra and Chinese AI
- Collaboration Agents and the Statistical Engine of Mediocrity
- Unlimited Intelligence, More Drudgery
- Apple’s Deliberate AI Strategy
- Dress for the Slide
- Maps and Territories
- Arsenal and the Passage of Time
- The Two Drivers
- Anthropic, xAI and the Inference Moat
- Three Essays About the AI Future
- Running AI in Production
- The Case for an AI Fast
- Scars From Building AI
- When Engineering Stops Saying No
- Where to Invest in AI
- The Doppelgänger
- Path Dependence
- Surviving the Dark Forest
- The Spigot
- On Agents and Harnesses
- Chatbots are driving a generational divide
- The Smiley Face Won
- Exchanging Insight for Output
- Cursor vs. Claude Code on Token Costs
- Why multi-modal embeddings are a big deal.
- Governing AI-Assisted Engineering
- Who Gets to Decide?
- Living With a Personal Agent
- Anthropic, the Pentagon, and the Judgment of Future Claude
- When Your App Becomes a Context Provider
- Context Engineering as Narration
- The Lego Model: How Tool Calling Changes the Way We Build AI Applications
- Building at the Speed of Thought
- What if ASI Leads to Stasis?
- Book Review: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
- A Letter to 2025
2025
- 2025: My Year in Books
- 2025: The Year I Became A Cyborg
- The Same Window For Everything
- Ilya Sutskever, the Scaling Hypothesis, and the Art of Talking Your Book
- Is Your AI Playing Roulette, Poker, or War?
- Prompting Is All You Need
- Why is LLM writing so weird?
- 5 Mental Models to understand the current AI Moment.
- Building a Truth-Seeking AI is a Sisyphean Endeavor
- Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
- We’re DDoS-ing ourselves with AI Slop.
- How do LLMs understand Gujarati?
- Why do LLMs hallucinate?
- MIT Study – 95% of Generative AI Investments Fail (or do they?)
- Roadtrippin’
- A most pleasant parking lot
- Do agentic coding tools make us less productive?
- Agency and LLMs as Mentors
- What is a vibe coder really?
- To replit or not to replit ..
- ChatGPT rotting your brain? .. maybe?
- AI, Friction, and Credibility
- Building hyper-personalized AI Apps..
- AI safety in 2025
- Agentic coding tools and the problems of agency
- Dispatches from Mediocristan
- Why I’m Riding The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride in 2025
- The AI Leadership Paradox: When Slowing Down Becomes a Competitive Advantage
- AI & Avoiding Hyperbole
- On DeepSeek
- Show, Don’t Tell: Enhancing Communication with AI Tools
2024
2023
- The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor
- Smallville, Agent Based Modeling, and Capital Markets
- The Future is Here..
- Book Review – A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
- Generative Models and the “Grey Goo Problem”
- Google, Microsoft and the Search Wars
- Explaining Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback with Star Trek
- Ben Thomson’s “4 Horsemen of the Tech Recession”
- Book Review: “Artificial Intelligence – A Guide for Thinking Humans” by Melanie Mitchell
- Big Tech’s Layoffs, AI, and the Closing of the Productivity Gap
- The Limits of Generative AI
2022
- Stability.AI – Democratizing Access to Machine Learning
- AlphaTensor – Speeding up number crunching with Machine Learning
- TikTok – Succeeding with ML (and lots of cash)
- Natural Language Processing Made Easy with GPT-3
- The Ethereum Merge
- From Elden Ring to Hades: What Video Game Design Taught Me About Management
- Mikel Arteta – A Case Study in Radical Candor
- Machine Learning and its consequences
- George Saunders on Feedback
- Climate Change and Category Errors
- Crypto and Transaction Costs
- Elon Musk & The Twitter Algorithm
- Between Rock and a.. podcast?
- On crypto outages
- On Roblox’s Outage
- On Forgiveness in UX Design
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
- Fiction: The Facility
- Fiction: The Spirit and the Voice
- Fiction: The last cornershop in Islington
- Fiction: The Festival
- Review: Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
- Review: Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
- Review: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
- Review: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
- Review: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
2015
- Review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
- Books of 2015
- Review: The Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford
- Review: The Water Knife by Paulo Bacigalupi
- Review: Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
- Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- Review: The Martian by Andy Weir
- Review: Poseidon’s Wake by Alastair Reynolds
- Review: The Docker Book by James Turnbull
- Review: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim et. al
2014
2013
2012
- Review: A.I. Apocalypse by William Hertling
- Working Effectively In Multi-Cultural Teams: Email and Teleconferences
- Review: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
- Review: Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling
- Review: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
- Review: Caliban’s War by James S. A. Corey
- Review: Leviathan Wakes by James Corey
- Review: Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds
- On the other side of the water
- Review: Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
- Review: A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
- Review: The Fear Index by Robert Harris