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Articles about building products, growing audiences, and crafting experiences

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Nothing To See Here Yet

Every product has a moment before it has any data in it, and almost nobody designs for that moment on purpose. This is about why that screen keeps shipping broken, and what a good one should actually look like.

Learning to Wait Again

I m not optimizing my rest so I can output more on the other side. I just noticed at some point this year that I d stopped leaving any space between having an idea and doing something about it.

Six Out of Ten

I ve been sending email for over a decade. Across the newsletters I run we push roughly three million emails a quarter, every day, to lists in the tens of thousands.

Unwritten Ideas Don't Count

People kept asking why I hadn t gone full-time on my own stuff. I had answers ready, the kind you assemble on the spot about stability and liking the team, and I didn t quite believe them while I was saying them. So I sat down to write about it.

The Code You Didn't Write

I pulled down a codebase for some work, like I normally do. I cloned the repo, installed the dependencies, spun it up locally, and started poking around to get my bearings. Then things started looking strange.

Designing for One

No audience to picture and no personas on the whiteboard. There s no imagined user whose confusion you have to design around. It s just you with the problem in front of you. You have the freedom to solve it exactly the way your own brain wants it solved.

Judgment Bottleneck

That puts me on one side of a heated argument. A well-known METR study in 2025 found experienced developers were around 19% slower with AI while sure they were faster, and skeptics passed it around as proof.

The Subject Is a Vehicle

I m proud of her in the uncomplicated way you re allowed to be when someone you love finishes something hard. She put in the years and earned every bit of it on her own merit.

An Audience of Agents

Cloudflare, which sits in front of roughly a fifth of the web, said that agents now visit more sites than humans do. When someone asks a chatbot a question, the agent behind it might touch hundreds or thousands of pages to assemble one answer.

The Slop Floor

You search for how to do something you already half-know, in a field you actually work in. The first page is 10 results deep in machine-written filler, and you can tell within seconds. They all open the same way, with a line about why the topic matters more than ever.