Writings

Essays on AI, product thinking, cognitive science, design, and the craft of building things that matter.

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  • → Your AI vs My AI 19 min Jensen Huang told Joe Rogan that AI will become personal, that your AI will fight for you. He's right about the destination but the path there is stranger than anyone's admitting.
  • → Guide to Compilers Class: First Principles Thinking 9 min I had the audacity to take a compilers class in my first semester of college. Here's how first principles thinking turned a nightmare into something I actually love.
  • → The Spec Is Everything: How I Built a 14-Agent Team That Actually Works 22 min I designed a multi-agent system to audit a physics engine. The agents weren't the hard part. The orchestration protocol was.
  • → Collective Intelligence & Swarm Cognition 18 min How groups outperform individuals and what this means for AI-human collaboration.
  • → Writing as a Thinking Tool 15 min Why writing is the best way to clarify your thinking.
  • → Interdisciplinary Thinking 22 min Why the most interesting problems live at the intersection of fields
  • → Note-Taking for Output 18 min A system for turning notes into published work.
  • → Information Architecture Principles 17 min Organizing information for humans and machines — from library science to modern UX.
  • → Attention & Cognitive Load 16 min Managing cognitive load to optimize focus, retention, and creative output.
  • → Knowledge Work Leverage 20 min How to multiply the impact of knowledge work through systematic leverage
  • → Pool: The Mental Game 18 min Notes on the psychological aspects of competitive pool.
  • → Neuroplasticity & Skill Acquisition 16 min What neuroscience tells us about how adults learn new skills and form new neural pathways.
  • → Aggressively Document Your Life 23 min The case for relentless digital documentation of everything you do, think, and build
  • → Product Sense & Intuition 16 min Developing the taste and judgment that separates great PMs from good ones.
  • → Ontology of Information 25 min How we categorize, relate, and structure knowledge — from Aristotle to knowledge graphs.
  • → Building AI-Native Products 16 min What makes a product AI-native vs AI-augmented.
  • → Interaction Design for AI Systems 19 min Designing intuitive interfaces for unpredictable AI behavior.
  • → Philosophy of Mind & Machine Consciousness 22 min Exploring the hard problem of consciousness through the lens of modern AI.
  • → Epistemology of AI Knowledge 20 min What does it mean for a machine to 'know' something? Epistemic frameworks for AI.
  • → Second Brain Architecture 21 min Building a personal knowledge management system that actually works
  • → Embodied Cognition & Intelligence 16 min Why intelligence isn't just computation — how physical embodiment shapes cognition and what that means for AI.
  • → User Research Methods 22 min Practical approaches to understanding users — from interviews to behavioral analytics.
  • → Agent Architecture Patterns 18 min Common patterns for building AI agents that work in production.
  • → Against Productivity Culture 14 min Why optimizing for output misses the point of creative and intellectual work.
  • → On Writing 23 min Advice, resources, and hard-won lessons on the craft of writing
  • → Retrieval-Augmented Thinking 19 min How RAG principles apply to human knowledge work.
  • → Product Intuition vs Data 17 min When to trust your gut vs when to let the data decide.
  • → Research → Product Translation 26 min Bridging the gap between research findings and shipped products
  • → Deliberate Practice Systems 17 min Applying deliberate practice principles to skill development.
  • → The Future of Knowledge Work 14 min How AI reshapes what it means to think for a living.
  • → LLM Evaluation Frameworks 18 min How to measure what matters in language model performance.
  • → Why Most AI Products Fail 15 min The gap between demo magic and production value — and how to bridge it.
  • → The Myth of the 10x Engineer 14 min Why the 10x engineer narrative is harmful, what the research actually says, and what matters more than individual output.
  • → PKM Systems That Actually Ship 16 min Building knowledge systems that produce output, not just archives.
  • → Metrics That Matter 18 min Choosing the right metrics and avoiding Goodhart's Law in product development.
  • → QuestionBench: Measuring How Well AI Agents Ask Questions 13 min QuestionBench: A benchmark to evaluate AI agents' ability to strategically ask questions and gather information.
  • → Memory Consolidation & Learning 17 min How the brain consolidates memories during sleep and what it means for deliberate learning.
  • → Artificial vs Human Intelligence 15 min Where AI surpasses human cognition, where it falls short, and why the comparison matters.
  • → The Spec-to-Ship Pipeline 18 min From product spec to shipped feature in the AI era.
  • → Theories of Intelligence 16 min From Spearman's g-factor to Gardner's multiple intelligences to modern computational views.
  • → Design as Thinking Tool 16 min How design thinking extends beyond aesthetics into problem-solving and systems reasoning.
  • → AI, AGI, and the Future: Insights from the Last Two Weeks 4 min AI, AGI, and the Future.
Showing 42 of 42 writings