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Field notes on agent fleets, open source, and what actually broke along the way

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS

06-28-26

Write Loops, Not Prompts

A prompt gets you an answer. A loop gets you a system that keeps answering after you close the laptop.

06-28-26

Write Loops, Not Prompts

A prompt gets you an answer. A loop gets you a system that keeps answering after you close the laptop.

Browse all articles

Showing 56 articles

06-28-26

Write Loops, Not Prompts

A prompt gets you an answer. A loop gets you a system that keeps answering after you close the laptop.

06-19-26

The 44-Second Turn

How per-turn tool filtering shredded our prompt cache: 74K cache-write tokens every turn, zero reads, 44 seconds to first token.

06-10-26

Never Trust an Agent Self-Report

The work is done when the evidence survives an attack. Everything else is a self-report.

05-28-26

Agents Are the Primary Users

Close to 100 packages, one rule: every tool ships a CLI, an MCP server, an SDK, and --json — because the user is an agent.

05-15-26

Open Source Is the Moat

Software has no moat anymore. The ecosystem is the moat — and you defend it with provenance and loops.

05-05-26

Open Core, Hard Boundaries

A private product consumes its own open-source core through public, versioned npm exports, exactly like a stranger would. The design docs spend real effort saying what a package must never become.

04-28-26

Fork With Provenance

Codex became Codewith, Yazi became our file-manager fork, Zellij became our terminal-multiplexer fork — three forks, one paper trail each, and a rule for when a fork has earned the right to exist.

04-21-26

Surviving a Package Hijack

A hijacked open-source package is never only your incident — it is every stranger's incident who trusted the name enough to install it. That is the real argument for defending the commons with automation you have actually verified.

04-14-26

Hard Limits Are Governance

No file over 700 lines. Subagent concurrency capped by policy, not vibes. Numbers are how the system says no on your behalf at 3am.

04-07-26

Token Economics Is an Operating Discipline

Cost per account, per agent, per machine, cache-write pricing tiers tracked separately, and every estimate reconciled against the real invoice. Anything less is a bill you have not opened yet.

03-31-26

Compute Is the Leash

Not rules, not alignment, not terms of service. Compute is what actually constrains an agent — and personal AGI means owning the part of that constraint you can.

03-24-26

Model Routing in Practice

A gateway underneath everything, subscription profiles run as fleet capacity, a usage heartbeat that auto-switches on rate limits, and Claude for speed, Codex for orchestration, Haiku for QA.

03-17-26

Cheap Workhorse, Frontier Verifier

A cheap model produces, a frontier model verifies through an explicit approved call, and structured markdown lets the smart model write the plan once so a cheap model can execute it a thousand times.

03-10-26

The Twelve-Reviewer Board

Twelve adversarial reviewers, six roles, two model tiers, a mandatory rebuttal round — how one architecture question got decided without a meeting.

03-03-26

Evals Are the Secret Weapon

Correct has to be defined outside the thing being measured, then checked mechanically, every time — a cheap hook, two auditors who can't agree by default, and a browser that actually gets opened.

02-24-26

Actor/Verifier Loops

Something produces, something else checks — the same three-part shape, from a stuck sub-agent at 5 a.m. to a contract review, that lets delegation scale past what one person can watch.

02-17-26

Evidence or It Didn't Happen

A dead system and a quiet one send the identical signal. The fix isn't a smarter status message — it's refusing to count anything as evidence that a failure could produce by doing nothing at all.

02-10-26

The Loop That Guards the Loop

A dependency-update loop with nothing in front of it is not automation, it is an open door with a schedule attached.

02-03-26

Canary Loops

A loop that runs and does nothing looks identical to a loop that is dead. That single fact is the entire argument for canaries.

01-27-26

North Star Loops

Standing over a pane repeating yourself is not management, it is a job with no salary. A north star loop is the same instruction, said once, that keeps saying itself.

01-20-26

Nested Loops: Machines That Maintain Themselves

A machine that needs you every morning is not automated, it is just slow to fail. Nested loops are the difference.

01-13-26

Dispatch Doesn't Assume Success

tmux send-keys is flaky: the Enter often doesn't submit and the text just sits in the composer. A dispatch tool that doesn't verify delivery is worse than no dispatch tool at all.

01-06-26

The Org Chart Lives in tmux

Named machines, named agents, a coordinator that never writes code, and a hard cap on how many can run at once. Not a metaphor. An actual operating structure.

12-30-25

Voice-First Specs

I do not write tickets. I talk in walls of intent, and a fleet decomposes them into plans, gated by hard brakes I do not always have to pull myself.

12-23-25

Debloat Is a Feature

Elegant, scalable, debloated is one discipline in three words. The proof: a sidebar with thirty-five destinations, collapsed to nine.

12-16-25

The Substrate Does Not Get to Lose Data

SQLite under a predictable directory, daemons that survive restarts, idempotency keys so a retried loop can't create duplicates. Agents crash. The state does not get to.

12-09-25

CLI, MCP, SDK: Four Doors Into the Same Room

A tool that only speaks MCP can't run from a cron job. A tool that only speaks CLI can't be called from another agent's process. Build all four doors, or don't bother.

12-02-25

One Hundred Building Blocks

Close to 100 Apache-2.0 repositories, one noun and one domain each, assembled like legos into every product I ship. When someone asks how it works, the answer is a repo link, not a waitlist.

12-02-25

The Secret Ingredient Is That There Isn't One

The world was built by people no smarter than you. There is no secret ingredient. The secret is your mind's capacity to create, and the courage to act on it without fear.

11-25-25

Big Systems Thinking

Tasks, memory, conversations, knowledge — each gets its own CLI-owned store. Ad hoc markdown is banned, and silence is not a valid status.

11-18-25

Gather, Refine, Experiment, Evolve

After fourteen years I tried to abstract what actually produced success. What came out was a loop: gather information, refine it, experiment with courage, and evolve. Then repeat.

11-18-25

The One-Builder Company

A three-tier delegation tree, coordinators that never touch code, and a headcount that is a config value, not a hiring plan.

11-11-25

Building My Own AGI Lab

An AGI lab of one builder, a fleet of agents, and close to 100 open-source building blocks. Not a metaphor — a floor plan.

11-04-25

From Eight Figures to Agents

Bootstrapped a healthcare business to eight figures on no outside money. The lessons that survived: ship over polish, make risk cheap, and outlast a dopamine-seeking brain.

11-04-25

AI-First or Irrelevant

Any company that wants to be here in five years will have to integrate AI. But be vigilant: use it for organizing and scaling, and never hand it the power to decide.

10-21-25

You Are Not Trapped in Your Country

The belief that you can only build where you happen to live is false. The only reason you cannot do something is that you have not learned how yet.

10-07-25

Automate the Pattern, Not the Panic

Automation is not automatically efficient. Do not automate anything until you understand your business model, then automate the winning pattern, and never forget that automation needs maintenance.

09-23-25

The Most Powerful Person Tells Stories

Steve Jobs once asked who the most powerful person in the world is. The answer: the one who knows how to tell stories. Because a story creates something in someone's mind, and attachment follows.

09-09-25

Build Around the Problem, Not the Solution

Your product should be built around the problem you want to solve, never the solution. The problem is your north star. The solution can, and usually will, change.

08-26-25

The Reward Is Not at the End

Delayed gratification is the wrong frame. There is no reward waiting at the end of the quarter, the year, or the business. The reward is in every second you actually want to be part of what you are building.

08-12-25

There Is No Work-Life Balance, Only Inner Balance

An entrepreneur is active twenty-four seven, and the split between work and life only appears when you are not aligned with what you do. Build inner balance, and you can create anything.

07-29-25

Working Hard Is Not Working Twenty Hours

Working hard is not sixteen hours a day with the door closed. Hard is a barrier in the mind, and it turns into easy the moment you accept it and reconnect with why you started.

07-15-25

A-Players Bring A-Players

The people you bring in will bring people like themselves, not like you. A-players attract A-players, B-players bring C-players, and arrogance can kill a company before it starts.

07-01-25

Hire the Thinking Algorithm, Not the Résumé

Experience is cheap in a world where computers do most of the work. What you are actually hiring is how a person thinks, because business is decisions, and decisions come from algorithms of thought.

06-17-25

Delegation Starts With Knowing What You Want

If you cannot explain exactly what you want, no one can deliver it. Delegation is not offloading what you dislike, it is collaboration built on clarity, and it costs you decisions, not just money.

06-03-25

There Are No Hero Stories

At the start I was anxious, frustrated, and often desperate. There were no hero stories. Trust your potential when you cannot trust yourself, and forgive yourself constantly.

05-20-25

Risk Is Just an Experiment

Any decision is better than the absence of one. Risk is an invention of the mind, and the emotion you bring to it should be curiosity, not fear.

05-06-25

Your Mentors Are Not Their Quotes

A quote is a sliver of an experience with all the context stripped off. If you want to learn from someone, study how they think, not the magic sentence their ego handed you.

04-22-25

Go to the Source

In an ocean of information, quality comes from going to the source, not to the people who repeat it. And the goal is never to copy someone's path, only to understand its essence.

04-08-25

Sleep, Sport, Learn

Forget the rigid five-a-m rituals. Three constants compound into everything: sleep, training, and never stopping learning. The fourth is your tolerance for adversity.

03-25-25

Find the Winning Pattern, Then Press the Accelerator

The world runs on patterns, right down to your cells. Find the one structure that lets you win, replicate it, scale it, and press the accelerator on the one leverage point that makes everything explode.

03-11-25

Ship the Prototype, Then Listen

You are not the user, even when you are the user. A quality product is built iteratively, and the only reliable source of truth is the person who buys it.

02-25-25

Speed Is a Structure

Speed is not recklessness. It is the visible result of a structure built to move faster than everyone else, and knowing exactly when to slow down.

02-11-25

The Plan Fits on a Napkin

For a startup, the most complex plan you will ever need fits on a napkin. Build the product, launch the product. Everything else is decoration that can quietly kill you.

01-28-25

Invent Your Own Game

It is easy to start a business using the models that already exist. But if you truly want one to work, you have to invent your own game, with your own rules, built on your own strengths.

01-14-25

There Is No Competition, Only Partners

The company you fear is not your competition. In the worst case it is a chance to learn, and in the best case it is a partner. Stop slicing the pizza and start growing it.

Field notes on agent fleets, open source, and what actually broke along the way

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS

Write Loops, Not Prompts

Write Loops, Not Prompts

Browse all articles

Write Loops, Not Prompts

The 44-Second Turn

Never Trust an Agent Self-Report

Agents Are the Primary Users

Open Source Is the Moat

Open Core, Hard Boundaries

Fork With Provenance

Surviving a Package Hijack

Hard Limits Are Governance

Token Economics Is an Operating Discipline

Compute Is the Leash

Model Routing in Practice

Cheap Workhorse, Frontier Verifier

The Twelve-Reviewer Board

Evals Are the Secret Weapon

Actor/Verifier Loops

Evidence or It Didn't Happen

The Loop That Guards the Loop

Canary Loops

North Star Loops

Nested Loops: Machines That Maintain Themselves

Dispatch Doesn't Assume Success

The Org Chart Lives in tmux

Voice-First Specs

Debloat Is a Feature

The Substrate Does Not Get to Lose Data

CLI, MCP, SDK: Four Doors Into the Same Room

One Hundred Building Blocks

The Secret Ingredient Is That There Isn't One

Big Systems Thinking

Gather, Refine, Experiment, Evolve

The One-Builder Company

Building My Own AGI Lab

From Eight Figures to Agents

AI-First or Irrelevant

You Are Not Trapped in Your Country

Automate the Pattern, Not the Panic

The Most Powerful Person Tells Stories

Build Around the Problem, Not the Solution

The Reward Is Not at the End

There Is No Work-Life Balance, Only Inner Balance

Working Hard Is Not Working Twenty Hours

A-Players Bring A-Players

Hire the Thinking Algorithm, Not the Résumé

Delegation Starts With Knowing What You Want

There Are No Hero Stories

Risk Is Just an Experiment

Your Mentors Are Not Their Quotes

Go to the Source

Sleep, Sport, Learn

Find the Winning Pattern, Then Press the Accelerator

Ship the Prototype, Then Listen

Speed Is a Structure

The Plan Fits on a Napkin

Invent Your Own Game

There Is No Competition, Only Partners

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Write Loops, Not Prompts

What we shipped, what broke,and what we learned

What we shipped, what broke,
and what we learned