A thinking partner is a medium, not a source
A thinking partner's value is in what it pulls out of you, not the text it writes. Five things stock Claude gets wrong, and the 800 words of instructions that fix them.
Working notes on how technology changes real systems
Latest writing
There will always be something impressive left to do
People worry that if AI keeps improving, there will be nothing impressive left for humans to do. I disagree. What counts as impressive will simply change. A full rewrite of an existing large piece of code today is not trivial, but it's also definitely not impressive anymore. Five years ago, a full rewrite of the right type of
HTTP 402, still reserved
Identity, payments, and accountability online have never really been solved. They're not built into the protocols themselves. Payment was in the web's original vision: Tim Berners-Lee's first HTTP spec already had status code 402, "Payment required", where the client could retry a request "with a suitable ChargeTo header". No
Great ideas are incubated dumb ones
Estonia announced it will give AI agents digital IDs, and people are kind of skeptical and negative about it. I'm not. I think there's something to this. In general, I try not to shoot down new ideas by arguing against them as a knee-jerk reaction. Many ideas, when born, look quite weak or dumb. But
The low-value work left for humans
I recently used Claude to do the annual report for my holding company. It's an extremely simple company. There are no meaningful decisions to be made here. One invoice this year, and it's obvious how it should be handled. Still, Claude saved me probably an hour of searching for the correct way of doing things. I
Agentic UX ruins the coaching
One more thing that's annoying when using AI as a coach: any amount of reasoning tokens will make me switch away. Latency actually matters here. Two seconds is okay; twenty ruins the flow. There is also something more subtle. I don't take as much responsibility for my thoughts, am not as critical. I don't
AI coach
Can you build an AI coach? The obvious answer is yes: AI is great at spotting patterns in what you say, and you can ask it to use any style of coaching, any framework. An exec coach I used to work with thinks you can't build an AI coach, because true change happens in relation to another human.
How to install a Claude Code skill from GitHub
Install a Claude Code skill from any GitHub repo: the desktop steps, the two CLI commands, and why Claude keeps asking for permission afterwards.
Places to put the AI
Every product team building with AI faces the same question: where does the AI interaction go? Not the model or the prompt, but the affordance: the surface the user sees and interacts with. For my own reference and discussions I wanted to capture these. Even though the chat box is where this all got started, these are not stages of
Building a Google Slides renderer with coding agents
When I read about the Software Factory concept from StrongDM AI, I was intrigued. In part because of the ability to produce an impressively large and complex component. But even more so with how little it might take: could you really do that simply by taking pre-existing specs from the internet and have agents search the program space for