The highest-leverage act in building AI systems is understanding the mind that uses them.
Ideas on cognitive architecture, agentic workflows,
and why specification is the new literacy.
Seven essays from five months of building AI infrastructure — on what worked, what I learned about my own assumptions, and what changes when the technology stops being the bottleneck.
Read the first pieceIdeas
In suggested reading order
How Your Mind Actually Works
A framework for discovering cognitive operating characteristics and designing systems that fit
Most design asks "what do you want?" That's the wrong question. The right question is: how does your mind actually move?
Why AI Workflows Click for Some People
It's not about intelligence. It's about cognitive fit.
The people who take to AI workflows quickly have — usually by accident — found one that matches how they think.
7 min readThe Expertise Paradox
Why knowing how to build can make it harder to let go
The people thriving with AI tools aren't always the strongest engineers. That's not an accident — it's a pattern worth understanding.
8 min readThe Four Questions
A framework for understanding any AI agent system
Every agent system reduces to four questions. The answers predict whether it will work.
8 min readSpecification Is the New Literacy
When building is free, the bottleneck is knowing what to build
The shift from "can I build this?" to "can I specify this precisely enough that it gets built correctly?" changes everything.
9 min readWhen Systems Fix Themselves
Building an auto-healing architecture by composing the patterns that couldn't do it alone
Five campaigns, five phases, one closed loop. The story of building a self-correcting AI infrastructure — and what it revealed about composing agentic patterns.
9 min readDispatches from the Build
What I learned from building AI infrastructure sixteen hours a day for eight weeks
The velocity was real. So was the risk of burning the candle at both ends. Here's what sustained it — and what almost didn't.
10 min readAbout
I've been building software for twenty-five years across hobby retail, video games, and maritime shipping. Same instinct every time: find what's broken, make it work for people. In late 2025 I started building AI infrastructure. These essays came out of that work: what it looks like when you take specification seriously, and why it starts with understanding how you think.