Readables

Building a startup is mostly about surviving. Take the punch, pretend it did not hurt, and stay in the game long enough to land the one that counts.

Something I have noticed while working with AI and LLMs: time drags when I am disengaged and flies when I am absorbed in the problem.

The dopamine rush of working code now belongs to everyone. But an engineer who has lived and breathed the problem approaches it nothing like someone generating a lot of code — and the gap is wider than ever.

Generating your first piece of code feels like magic. Now that everyone has a coding harness, the hard part is not making something that works — it is the bar, the debt, and the failure modes nobody understands.

Git versions the cheap thing. The invariants, the rejected paths, the scars — the part that cannot be regenerated — live in a scrollback buffer. The case for SOUL.md as the real source, and src/ as the build artifact.

GitHub’s August 17 post-mortem shows commits per month doubling to 2.9 billion since April. What git still records, what it no longer does, and the layer that is missing above it.

One task, one Friday evening, and --dangerously-skip-permissions. Fifteen hours later I owned enterprise-grade infrastructure I couldn't recognize — including a Kubernetes written in Rust to babysit the other Kubernetes.

Agents get you to 90% fast. The last 10% is where the engineering lives — and it still belongs to you. Notes on the last mile, decisions, and scope creep.

Alone with a beer in Leidseplein, talking to ChatGPT. A short note on what AI does to us socially — and the one thing it could never recommend.

A Dutch ISP's agent told me the office was closed for the weekend. A short note on what happens when the rhythms we built for ourselves bend the systems we build.

Vibecoding without a plan stacks tech debt fast. A PRD per task — kept in lockstep with the code — is what lets us ship AI-generated features with confidence.

The 12-month engineering plan I built six months ago is now irrelevant. Notes on what changes when leadership has to be fullstack.

On letting Claude run my infra, and what I saw on the other side.

A short note on what this site is for and why it exists.