Situated-Cost Alignment
An idea doesn't become a business because it's good, but when it removes more cost than it adds for each actor who has to say yes. A materialist approach to building a business.
Le secrétaire de Fernand
Le secrétaire de Fernand website.
Latest posts
Outgrow Your Taste, Don't Defend It
Building a software solution is three distinct activities: understanding a reality, engineering a general machine, and encoding one into the other. Taste is required by none of them, which is exactly why ego hides there.
Make Feedback Loops Attribute, Don't Just Detect
Why feedback loops become more powerful when code makes its system concepts explicit.
Letting Go in Our Relationship to Production
On what we can inhabit in our effort, and what must remain exposed to reality when we produce for others.
My Why, My How, My What
A personal note on what drives my work, how I like to build, and the concrete forms through which my values can take shape.
How AI Is Changing Our Relationship to Work in Software Engineering
On the excitement of AI-assisted coding, the disappearance of friction, and the need to learn how to tame our new tools.
Letting Go in Our Relationship with Others
On self-assertion, other people’s judgment, and what we cannot control in how we are received.
AI Makes It Absurd to Keep Engineers Away from Reality
When the cost of producing code falls, value shifts toward understanding the real problem.
Can Startups Share Value More Fairly Without Scaring Investors?
A proposal for investor-compatible startup ownership that recognizes both financial capital and the time spent building the company.
Letting Go Does Not Mean Stopping Acting
A practical definition of letting go: act on the conditions, then accept the uncertainty of adaptation.
Attention Capital
Why modern inequality is also about the ability to protect one’s time, attention, and environment.
Encode, Don't Imply
Why the implicit becomes fragile when humans and agents co-produce code.
Do Humans Change, or Do They Adapt?
A simple thesis: human beings do not directly remake themselves; they are transformed mainly through adaptation to their conditions of life.
The Brain Needs Recovery Too
What sport can teach us about effort, recovery, and intellectual work.
Dual-Capital Contributive SAS
A proposal for a startup structure that remains legible to investors while sharing created value more fairly based on the time and energy invested.
The Time Ideas Need
On maturation, attention, and what speed cannot replace.
How I Write the Articles Published Here
An honest explanation of my working method for writing the articles published on Le secrétaire de Fernand.
Build Systems, Don't Polish Prose
We still talk about code as if it were style. But code runs in the world.
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Le secrétaire de Fernand — about the project.