Field notes — building with AI

Software is no longer written only by people who learned to code. I write about building real things with AI, and teaching the rest to do the same.

Essays on agentic coding, the craft of prompting tools like Claude Code and Gemini CLI, and dispatches from teaching non-coders to ship working software.

Prompting With Emotional Pressure: A Mid-Experiment Report

An honest write-up of an experiment that hasn't finished and may not finish the way it started. The question: does emotional pressure make an AI behave worse, the way the interpretability research predicts? The answer so far is quieter and more useful than the dramatic version — and the dead ends turned out to be most of the result.

Jun 4, 2026 · 20 min read Read essay →

Recent writing

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Jun 2, 2026

How AI Taught RunPee to Speak 41 Languages

How a solo founder taught a movie app to speak 41 languages using AI agents as a workforce — and the unglamorous engineering that made it actually work.

13 min read

Jun 2, 2026

What non-coders need to know about code before they vib-code themselves into a black hole

A $20 Claude subscription gives you a tireless expert work crew. It does not give you the instinct to notice that storm water runs straight into your front door. Here's what an experienced developer would warn you about before you build your first app.

18 min read

Apr 27, 2026

Hello, world.

First post on LogosPress — the static-first, AI-extensible blog engine I'm building to replace WordPress.

meta intro

1 min read

Apr 22, 2026

The Software Industry at Scale (A Few Observations From Someone Getting Old)

Forty years is enough time to watch patterns repeat. A few things I've noticed about how the industry changes — and how it doesn't.

software reflection retrospective

7 min read

Apr 15, 2026

RunPee and the API Economy (Or: What I Learned When Suppliers Get Acquired)

Over seventeen years, almost every third-party dependency RunPee relies on has changed its terms, gotten acquired, raised prices, or died. A few lessons from that.

runpee architecture side-projects

5 min read