Writing in public
Notes from the build
Thinking out loud about building things when the tools change faster than anyone can document.
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.
Read the essay →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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