WRITING
Longer pieces on how things actually work: product judgment, delivery under pressure, what changes when agents write most of the code — and the occasional guide to a technology worth understanding properly.
jQuery became the plumbing of the internet by fixing the web’s biggest headache — then the web rebuilt its plumbing around jQuery’s design, and the tool became invisible because its ideas were everywhere. The design choice that saved a language from itself, why distribution beat features, and why a library everyone calls dead still runs on two thirds of all websites.
A quantum computer isn’t a faster computer — it’s a boat where everyone else has a car: useless for most trips, and the only thing that can cross a handful of oceans. What a qubit really is, why wave interference rather than “trying every answer at once” is the actual mechanism, the five hardware platforms still racing, why errors are the central obstacle, and a sober timeline for when any of it will matter.
Writing code was the slowest, costliest step in software for fifty years, and the whole lifecycle existed to aim that scarce act correctly. When agents make implementation nearly free, the constraint moves to planning, review, deployment — and to deciding whether to build at all. Why Uber’s doubled output, Amazon’s 4.5× frontier-development pilots and METR’s 19% slowdown are all true at once, what the lifecycle becomes when governance is executed rather than convened, and what the shift costs the people doing it.