The cheapest agent is a bash script
Where the automation continuum actually pays: replacing an agent loop with forty lines of deterministic shell, and how to spot the tasks where that is true.
AI ECONOMICS↳ AUTOMATION
FIELD NOTES
What the Work Teaches
Writing that accumulates rather than scrolls. Every note is connected to the system or workflow it came from. Follow a note back to its origin and the route lights up.
AGENTIC ENGINEERINGSOFTWARE ARCHITECTUREAUTOMATIONBUILDING PRODUCTSAI ECONOMICSFAILURE ANALYSISPRACTICAL EXPERIMENTSCAREER & CRAFT
What a challenge round catches
A month of logging every plan that failed adversarial review: wrong assumptions about data shape dominate, hallucinated APIs are rarer than expected.
AGENTIC ENGINEERING↳ WORKFLOWS
Programmatic pages without the spam
The quality thresholds that keep generated local pages genuinely useful, and what happened to the ones that missed the bar.
BUILDING PRODUCTS↳ FOUNDMYPRO
Two near-misses with autonomous upgrades
The dependency-upgrade experiment that got discarded: what the tests missed, and why "green" was not the same as "safe".
FAILURE ANALYSIS↳ LAB
Why Sentinel is not launched
Liability, trust and the discipline of delaying a product whose failure modes land on someone else's production system.
BUILDING PRODUCTS↳ SENTINEL
From service floor to system design
What hospitality operations teach about software: standards are behaviour under pressure, and every system is judged at its worst moment.
CAREER & CRAFT↳ ABOUT