I Am Often Wrong
In January I made a prediction about gene editing. Five months later it broke. I got the right street but the wrong address.
Colin Steele
Blog posts by Colin Steele
Latest posts
Don't Sleep on Meta: Capex Actually Makes Sense
The market thinks Meta is in the AGI race. Meta is in the cat video race. There is a difference, and PE of 22 is low.
Yeah, baby! Austin Powers Writes Firmware
What it actually looks like to cross from symbol-world into atoms-world, brick a board in the process, and spend the day at a Latin Mass written in 1975.
The Involuntary Entrepreneur
I have a stupidity detector. It fires whether I want it to or not. Two market shapes set it off (larval and fossilized) and the tax shows up whether or not anyone credits the work.
Distribution is Dead
I built a product that solves a real problem. The internet doesn't care. Here are my four options, all of them bad.
Majors and Generalizations
You don't generalize from cups. You specialize from physics. Cognition is navigation of a single manifold where intent is the tangent vector, risk is the curvature, and the metric is the scar tissue.
What Do CAD and Real Estate Have in Common?
Dassault sells you the right to read your own design files. NAR sold you the right to see the housing market. Same grift, different industry. One got sued. The other won't.
Superfantastic Sidecars and How to Build Them
The enterprise UI was a 30-year workaround for not being able to talk to databases. The workaround is over. A builder's guide to the $5-50M vertical opportunities the giants will never touch.
In 2026, Software > SaaS
The industry forgot how to build software that runs on the user's machine. Some of us didn't. Here's what happens next.
Game Design Journal 2026-03-08
Why CRAWL! combat works. One action, two trays, and nowhere to hide.
The Paleozoic Era of Agentic Frameworks
99.99% of agentic frameworks are evolutionary dead ends. The Permian extinction is coming.
Ground Beneath the Map
There's a layer in your brain between reality and symbols, that both language and logic rest on. Transformers lack this layer.
Elegy for Lonely Fun
Lonely fun is lost. What remains is pale in comparison.
Lightning Talks Part I
A collection of deliberate bear poking.
Island of Misfit Startups: Part IV (SkyVida)
You can't file a flight plan for a million delivery drones.
Game Design Journal 2026-02-15
Die, usage die! The usage die can kiss my d20.
300 Nopes
A Stanford survey cataloging ~300 papers on LLM reasoning failures just confirmed every architectural diagnosis I made.
Raytheon Ate My Terrier
Two months ago I proposed layered cognitive-kill drone defense built around cheap autonomous interceptors. Yesterday, Raytheon demoed exactly that. They also revealed the gap I'm most worried about.
Say What You Do
I wrote that whole departments would vanish. Then I proved it twice in a month. AS9100-grade QMS and a complete Team Operating System, built part-time with LLMs. Nobody got fired. The jobs just never existed.
The Horse Job Cope
Technology has always created more jobs than it destroys. That has been correct for two hundred years. It is about to stop being correct.
Game Design Journal 2026-02-05
The heist shouldn't feel like a spelling bee
Eksterulo
The failure to reason is a symptom. The failure to relate is the disease. Frontier models do not relate.
Granna Holchoy’s Riddles
Are you paying attention? Granna has some riddles for you.
Book Smart
LLMs are trained on the compression of human experience, not experience itself. The territory they'd need to become intelligent is fundamentally alien to ours.
Margin Play
The same optimization that turned feeds into dopamine casinos is now operating on AI assistants.
The Last Levee
'Massively polygenic' was our security blanket against designer humans. AlphaGenome just pulled it off. The only levee left is ethics. Don't laugh.
Story Time for CXOs
Meetings replaced memos the same way the feed replaced thinking. Same thermodynamic disease, different host.
Island of Misfit Startups: Part III (Mini Cricket)
$100 helmet-mounted edge AI that buzzes 'INCOMING DRONE' before the human ear even registers the sound.
Sequoia’s Mission Accomplished
Sequoia just declared AGI. Their definition is 'the ability to figure things out.' My Roomba is AGI now. Someone call the LPs.
Car Keys
RLMs and MoR are real progress. They're also still not reasoning. A critique of the cutting edge.
Island of Misfit Startups: Part II (KesslerGym)
Train your satellite AI for Tuesday in LEO with bad data. A 'messy reality' simulation environment for autonomous space traffic management.
Petty Gods
The accelerationists expect the Rapture. The doomers expect Ragnarok. Both are fairy tales. What actually arrives is worse: narrow superintelligences that solve everything except the thing that matters.
Island of Misfit Startups: Part I (LensReader)
Algorithmic feeds are bad for your brain. This startup is vitamins for your brain.
Axioms of Polity
A manifesto for human/machine polity charting civispace. Neither as apex mind. A forest.
Marvin
Your ASI needs a hug.
Geometry Saves Mawmaw
I proposed that goal-space geometry could replace executive function in AI architectures. Then I discovered the math already exists.
Cargo Cult Civilization
Your attention-algorithm feed isn't corrupting you. It's completing a transaction your biology was always ready to make. And a population optimized for minimum cognitive expenditure is maximally controllable.
Ludonarrative Puppets, Sandwiches, and AI
A TTRPG about self-aware puppets who know they're being controlled, and the only freedom left: laughing at it loudly enough that it hurts.
AI Can’t Help Mawmaw, But Worms Can
A robot caring for your grandma needs to fluidly inhabit radically different forms of cognition: creativity, logic, and crisis. Nothing in current AI architectures explains how. Worms might.
Frontier Models Do Not Think
Transformers don't reason. They perform reasoning kabuki theater. What's missing isn't capability, it's coordination.
Corporate Politics: The Cockroach of Capitalism
As automation commoditizes execution and cognition, the most durable form of human labor is not leadership or knowledge work, but illegible, risk-bearing, political coordination. An essay on why corporate politics survives every technological wave.
Vermin, Terriers and Transformers
If $500 drones can destroy the power grid (or an aircraft carrier), million-dollar missiles aren't a defense strategy. They're bankruptcy. A look at the 'Vermin' problem and why we need an immune system for critical infrastructure.
Paul Graham Can Kiss My App
Why I'm intentionally building Taleway wrong (no accounts, no UI, no engagement metrics) and why that might be exactly right for 2025
Build Bridges, Not Moats
Prognistication and contemplation of the nature of sustainable competition, circa 2025
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
I am the captain of my soul
Game Design Journal 2025-10-29
5E: the mall food court of roleplaying games
Game Design Journal 2025-10-29
Player skill? Character skill? Chocolate AND Peanut Butter?
Apple Is a Duopolistic Predator, and I Know What Their Next Move Is
Building an ambient audio app revealed Apple's blueprint for the future, and it's not about innovation. It's about control. Here's what they're building next.
Yes, YOU Can Have Your Very Own Sears Catalog Moment
Your website doesn't matter anymore. Your API does. AI agents are killing web traffic the same way Amazon killed Sears catalogs. Here's what happens next.
Building with Astro
Thoughts on static site generators