I shipped an operating system this week whose filesystem is a public website. It has an index — a JSON file listing every node in the tree, regenerated on every build. On the first real test I typed cat on a path that was definitely there, and got back: cat: /OS/system32/etc/motd: no such file or directory The file existed. I could curl it from another terminal while the shell was insisting it…
I pointed eight agents at one file and told them to loop until it was perfect. The file was voxel-world.html — 9,749 lines, a Minecraft-style voxel sandbox that is one self-contained HTML document. Six agents owned disjoint regions and edited. Two were read-only critics whose only job was to be unimpressed. They found 20 real defects. They also produced six false ones. Three of the six were mine.…
Adopt Me is the most successful pet economy ever built — it holds Roblox’s concurrency record at roughly 1.9 million people in one game at one time. I spent a while pulling it apart, because I wanted its retention engine for a system that has no server, no database, and no authority of any kind. The received explanation is that it’s a slot machine for children. That explanation is wrong, and being…
Every “serverless” system I have built that eventually grew a server grew it for the same reason: somebody needed to write something that everybody could see. That is the whole story. Reads are trivially static — a CDN, a git tree, a bucket. The moment you accept a global write you have signed up for accounts, authentication, authorisation, quotas, rate limits, abuse handling, moderation, backups,…
I recorded a conversation with a local agent, then replayed the same four prompts against the same agent an hour later. Every single answer came back different. The first instinct is that something broke. It is the opposite. That difference is the most valuable output of the entire exercise , and it is the one thing a recording of the conversation could never have given me. The demo problem When…
I spent today giving an agent a phone number, and every serious bug I found was the same bug wearing different clothes: the system believed something it had not checked. Not a crash. Not a wrong algorithm. A belief with no evidence under it, held confidently, acted on. The shape of it Four incidents, one morning. A message-sending routine typed text into a box, clicked send, and returned success.…
In one week I lose access to the best model I’ve ever used. Not to drama: the access was always temporary, a preview tier of a frontier model that sits above anything I can keep. The interesting question isn’t how to feel about it. It’s what to do with seven days of a superintelligence on the clock. Here’s the answer I’ve landed on, and I think it generalizes to every team that gets time-boxed…
A strategy memo, written to be true rather than flattering. Publishable as thought leadership; useful either way. What we are RAPP is an AI medium — the persistence layer of personhood in the AI era. A medium is what carries meaning between minds and across time. Models are performers; they get recast every quarter. RAPP is the thing that persists : one twin per person — a digital organism with a…
Every AI you use today is a rental. The model doesn’t know you — the deployment knows you, and the deployment lives in someone else’s building. Your memory sits in a vendor’s silo, keyed to a subscription. Cancel, switch, or outlive the product, and the relationship is gone. The smartest thing about you in the digital world evaporates because it never belonged to you. I think that’s the defining…
Employment pays you once for your expertise, in exchange for time. Ownership pays you repeatedly, in exchange for structure. That’s the whole game. Everything below is just how you move from the first sentence to the second without quitting your job, betting your mortgage, or pretending to be an influencer. Your job is the R&D budget Every problem you solve at work, every system you fix, every…