438 million wallets, one app update
Stripe already owns stablecoin issuance, wallets, and a chain. Buying PayPal would put 438 million funded accounts one app update from Web3.
Notes · Ben Milleare
Notes on technical leadership, AI systems, and building things that scale.
Latest posts
Never double-charge: the UPDATE is the lock
Fixed Temporal workflow IDs, an UPDATE that doubles as a lock, and fail-closed reconciliation: layering double-charge protection into a payments system.
Does every CTO need a skunkworks?
With agentic teams, two hackers can spin up five MVPs while a normal team ships one feature. The case for keeping a skunkworks in your back pocket.
Containment beats permission
Coding agents should run unsupervised, but inside a dev environment that's safe to be wrong in. The agent boundary is the wrong line to defend.
Let the price do the migration
Most companies run a migration campaign to clear users off a deprecated API. Anthropic just tripled the price of theirs and let market forces do the work.
GitHub got hacked
GitHub had 3,800 internal repos exfiltrated via a poisoned VS Code extension. If your private repos have ever held a secret, rotate it today.
Marketing is the work
Brent Roose says PHP's biggest problem is marketing, not the tech. The same is true of almost every business that's quietly good at what it does.
Reselling tokens isn't a business
OpenAI is reportedly burning $1.69 for every dollar earned, and Anthropic is already raising prices. If your AI business is mostly API markup, the price floor is coming for you.
Multi-token prediction, on a small laptop
Google shipped multi-token prediction for Gemma 4. The headline 3x speedup is for big GPUs, but the edge-model drafters quietly target laptops like mine.
Vibe coding isn't engineering
Engineers treat coding agents as smart junior devs. Vibe coders treat them as their CTO. The gap matters more than the AI hype suggests.
Welcome to Notes
What this section is for, what to expect, and the loose rules I'm writing it under.