The Paradox of Prudence
The decisions that stagnate growing businesses aren't the bad ones; rather, they're a series of individually smart ones that never compound.
Rishi Dean
Unfiltered insights from a builder of products, teams, and organizations for those working in hard mode, with high stakes and no playbook.
Latest posts
Action Architecture: How Agents Act Safely
We've explored on this blog, systems that have a memory architecture, and how we can update that memory architecture to effectively "learn". Now, we explore how we can let agents run unsupervised safely. This is the final piece in the adaptive software architecture.
Sky's the Limit: a hands-on guide to agentic engineering
I recently introduced the "AI Adoption Continuum", that maps the proficiency of people & orgs. It uses a transportation metaphor, going from walking all the way to flying rockets. This tutorial aims to get you from "ground transportation" to "airborne" by showing how to build agent harnesses.
In Defense of Banality
In a culture obsessed with optimizing every minute, we've started treating enjoyments like spectator sports and comedy as a waste of time. That's exactly backwards; these 'banalities' are the essential infrastructure of a functioning society.
A Counter to the Counter to the SaaS-pocalypse
The strongest defense of SaaS just became the strongest case for building.
Token Tuition: Why You Can't ROI Your Way to AI Transformation
The two loudest reactions to AI token spend are both half-right and equally reactive.
$150 in Tokens Beats $150K in Consultants
We took the term 'vibe coding' and bolted it onto every use of AI across the be whole field. The vocabulary gap is actually strategic, not just semantic.
The Supercomputer in the Corner
Most companies are designing their AI Transformation efforts to increase productivity. But that alone just makes them a more efficient version of yesterday's company. The real game is deepening your relationship with your customer.
Layered Context: An Adaptive Memory Architecture for Agents
Once you're past isolated sessions, memory moves from a feature you bolt on, to the medium the agent runs on.
The Context Inversion
Specs have always been written for humans and scraped by machines. But the process has now reversed, as the scraping is now the primary read.
The Time Traveler's Dilemma
The Dilemma Drop someone from 1985 into today. Hand them a smartphone. Tell them to "just Google it." They'll understand your words, but will have no clue what you asked. They're bounded by the mental model of the past. Forty years of compounding context,
Portals vs. Protocols
In every mature tech duopoly, one ultimately becomes the dominant portal. Challengers who try to build a smaller, better portal lose, while the ones who win shift the axes of competition entirely.
The Contract Year
The career ladder was always a queue. AI just made the line transparent.
Code Over Config
For 30 years, software has told users how to work. Adaptive Software flips that. It watches how users actually work and rewrites itself around them. Here's the architecture behind software that learns, compiles, and evolves without a product roadmap.
Few Companies Know What AI Transformation Means
Most companies think AI transformation means new tools and greater productivity, but the goal is really to make everyone a "builder".