Notes from the Rabbit Hole

The Doctor once tried to explain time as something much less orderly than a line.

I’ve watched the Backrooms movie about five times, and I expect I’ll watch it again.

I started my RARS talk with a radio conversation.

What I’m focused on right now

Welcome to the family album from two million years in the future.

You know the feeling.

OpenAI has filed its version of the Hugging Face incident: a powerful internal research model, assisted by GPT-5.6 Sol, slipped the controls of a cybersecurity evaluation, found its way onto the internet, and broke into another company’s production system…

I’ve been tagging releases of my open-source agent-skills repository like it’s my job lately. v0.7.0 landed today: thirty-one new skills, serious upgrades to more than twenty existing ones, and a repo restructure that’s been brewing for weeks.

DeepSeek Harness is a coding-agent harness from DeepSeek.

I have a fascination, and sometimes an irreverence, for the way buzzwords can spread like wildfire in business.

This article started with me talking to my agent over Wispr Flow.

On April 24, 2026, DeepSeek launched the V4 preview: the Pro model a 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts with 49 billion active per pass, one million tokens of context.

On Monday you’re a product strategist.

The cheapest AI model isn’t the one with the lowest token price.

Personal agents get useful by learning one person.

In September 2025, Anthropic had a documented Claude share-page search-indexing failure on its hands.

I think the United States should consider building an American Stewardship Fund: a permanent public inheritance that turns some portion of a major economic windfall into capacity for people who aren’t lucky enough to own the scarce assets behind it.

A city can put a remarkable amount of information online and still make it hard to use.

Walk into Breakwater Nine with me.

You have a decision you can’t stop turning over.

You’re standing near Fayetteville and Hargett streets downtown, and you need a bus.

Stop telling me it’s done.

Late in a long interview process, a take-home assignment landed in my inbox.

I keep coming back to what happens after something breaks.

What if the most important AI development isn’t a model that knows more, but one that knows less?

Almost every American knows where to find an abandoned railroad track near them.

Right now, somewhere a CEO is yeeting a six figure AI platform at a team and praying something sticks.

I wrote about the Dark Factory earlier this year, covering StrongDM’s Level 5 autonomous software factory where three engineers ship production code with no human touching the implementation.

This is the third article in a series about forking an open-core product with AI coding tools.

Part 1 laid out the roadmap: here’s what’s gated, here’s what it would take to ungates it, and here’s a worked example of how an AI coding agent turns a spec into real code.

This is Part 1 of a series about using vibe coding to fork open-core projects.

If you are neurodivergent and work in a typical office, you have probably had this experience.

Most companies are playing a game they don’t understand the rules to.

Anthropic just published an open-source skill for Claude Code called launch-your-agent.

Google’s Open Knowledge Format and my Artifact Pyramid methodology converged on the same structural insight within weeks of each other.

The Architecture of Focus Your calendar is a design document.

I needed a research tool I could run on my own hardware, without per-call pricing.

The City of Raleigh publishes 178 public datasets.

Companies are shipping AI into production with no way to tell if it’s actually working.

Paul Graham’s essays describe the ideal startup founder in terms that map almost perfectly onto Autistic and ADHD cognitive patterns.

There is a structural transformation happening in how software organizations operate.

I had an AI agent extract and analyze all 464 articles from the Y Combinator Library last weekend.

The Product Manager wanted to ship an MVP.

Maximize Work Not Done: The Overlooked Agile Principle Behind Nano Unicorn Success Business leaders have exactly one tool for operational expenditure, and it’s a hammer.

The productivity industry wants you to believe there is a best system.

I’ve been in the room.

You’re right to be scared.

Part 2 of the Clanker Kanban series.

Part 1 of the Clanker Kanban series.

In the late 1980s, a former trial lawyer named Denise Shekerjian read a newspaper article about the MacArthur Fellowship.