Journal · 049 essays

Journal.

Essays, not posts. Each one is something I have actually run into, with the number attached where there is a number. Opinions are dated on purpose. I reserve the right to disagree with my past self, loudly.

2026 · 08 · 18 · 8 min read

Agents should have budgets like employees do

My agents spent just under three thousand dollars in three hours while I slept. The root cause was a billing failure, which meant one agent was spending money to investigate why it could not spend money.

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2026 · 08 · 11 · 7 min read

Never bake a model into your logic

When Opus 5 launched I changed a model name in a dashboard. No redeploy, no code review, no release. The reverse case matters just as much.

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2026 · 08 · 04 · 5 min read

The automation layer is being eaten

Zapier, Make and n8n were not out-competed. They were obsoleted by their own customers doing exactly what everyone asked them to do.

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2026 · 07 · 21 · 9 min read

Ground it or don't ship it

Neural nets do not return binary answers. They return a point on a spectrum that you then threshold. For a question where being wrong is unrecoverable, that is the wrong instrument.

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2026 · 07 · 07 · 6 min read

Write the revisit criteria first

Everyone writes success criteria. Some write failure criteria. Almost nobody writes the third thing, which is the one that survives a pivot.

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2026 · 06 · 16 · 8 min read

The cost of being early

Being on the cutting edge feels fantastic. That feeling is the warning sign, and it took me several companies to work out why.

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2026 · 05 · 26 · 6 min read

I still write the code

A CTO should not be coding. Except the way engineering gets done changed in about three years, and you cannot restructure an org around a shift you have only read about.

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2026 · 05 · 12 · 6 min read

The topic is only the nugget

My father set me summer research assignments and marked them in red pen. I thought he was teaching me to write. He was teaching me that the first answer is a surface, which is now the main thing I screen engineers for.

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2026 · 04 · 28 · 10 min read

Africa needs what Kai-Fu Lee's team did

Every organisation that tried to train African technical talent has drifted toward selling that talent onward. That drift is the finding, not the failure.

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