Writing in public
Notes from the build
Thinking out loud about building things when the tools change faster than anyone can document.
Invisible by Accident
Sixty-one businesses on a small island, put through the questions a customer would actually ask an AI. Eighteen came back in an answer. Forty-two did not exist – and not one of them had blocked anything. The local AI story is not refusal, and it is not a skills gap. Nobody was ever asked.
Read the essay →Promoted to Checker
Engineers agree on what they want AI to take: the drafting, the documentation, the standards binder. It is a clean deal, and it has a problem nobody has named – the drafting is where the design freedom was earned. The role is not vanishing. The entrance to it is closing.
→Atoms Don't Compile
Agentic coding made software four to six times faster – not because the models got smarter, but because the feedback loop collapsed to seconds. Hardware's loop still ends at a machinist's Tuesday. What physical product development is missing isn't a better CAD agent. It's a compiler.
→The Unqueryable Factory
Machine 7 has a name for that sound. Not in the manual. Not in the CMMS. The name lives in Karl, who has operated Machine 7 for nineteen years — and who retires in September. Every meaningful conversation about agentic AI in manufacturing eventually hits the same wall: the wall is what you can actually query.
→The Benchmark Nobody Was Running
Every benchmark of image-to-3D AI grades on textures. None grade on whether the result actually prints. So I built one.
→The Model Was Never the Problem
At the AI publishing platform I was running, we built a quality check that worked beautifully. Within weeks the flags were being muted. I keep coming back to it – because every piece of content I read about agentic AI in manufacturing has the same shape.
→The Forkable Factory
I was standing in a LEGO factory when I first saw a 3D printer work. That moment quietly shaped the next ten years of my life – and I think I'm having it again.
→The Quiet Ones
The people who best understand how AI works in the real world are the ones least likely to tell you about it. That's a problem. And an opportunity.
→The Personal OS
I spent a decade shaping plastic at LEGO. Now I shape prompts. The material changed – the impulse didn't. But something bigger is happening.
→The Game I Didn't Plan to Make
I made a snake game last week. Nobody cared. But sitting there watching the snake eat pixels on my screen, I couldn't stop thinking about what just happened – and what it means for everyone else.
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