July 10, 2026
You Can't Reverse Engineer Taste
AI can help you imitate what already works, but developing your own point of view requires living, making things, getting lost, and trusting your eye.
Writing
Notes on product, engineering, AI, and the work between them.
Practical essays for founders and technical leaders who need to make better decisions before the code, the team, or the roadmap gets expensive.
June 27, 2026
Is AI the End of Engineering, or Just the Beginning?
AI is eating some old software work, but it is also creating a new category of engineering: turning half-working AI systems into durable business tools.
June 26, 2026
The Problem With Abundance
AI may make digital things cheaper and easier to produce, but the scarce things people actually want will still be controlled, priced, and protected.
June 17, 2026
Cracking the AI Code Interview
The engineering interview has to change. In the AI era, the work is not just writing code faster. It is judgment, cost, quality, communication, and knowing what should be built at all.
June 17, 2026
I Don't Need More Horsepower. I Need More Road.
AI has made software teams faster than the feedback loop. The harder business problem now is growth, trust, distribution, and having enough road for all that horsepower.
June 15, 2026
The Agent Told Me It Was HIPAA Compliant
AI can generate convincing healthcare software. It cannot declare your product safe, legal, or compliant just because the checklist looks complete.
June 12, 2026
The Software Factory Works Best After You Know What You're Making
Agent loops are powerful for mature systems with known patterns. Product discovery still needs human judgment close to the work.
June 10, 2026
The Rise of Mediocrity and the Death of the Real Turd
AI did not make everything worse. It made bad harder to see.
June 9, 2026
The magic in the meeting
AI can make execution cheap, but the real product judgment still happens when the right people stay with the problem together.
June 8, 2026
Cast the Ring Into the Fire: Why Founders Must Resist the Temptation to Add One More Feature
Early products need one powerful story. Every extra persona, workflow, and feature can weaken the focus that makes the first users care.
June 5, 2026
A Runtime for Non-Deterministic UI
JSON Lisp started with a question: what if AI could stream the right interface for one user instead of forcing everyone through the winning side of an A/B test?
June 5, 2026
Building AI-Assisted Workflows Inside a Regulated Environment
Karvenience shows why sensitive data changes the AI conversation: credit applications, documents, integrations, and operational trust all need boundaries.
June 4, 2026
Production CTO for the AI-Prototype Era
Founders can get farther than ever with AI tools. The hard part is crossing the final mile into software customers can trust.
June 2, 2026
What to Do When Your AI Prototype Gets Stuck
The demo proved something. Now you need to figure out whether it is a product, a workflow, a throwaway prototype, or a technical trap.
June 1, 2026
Turning a Homegrown Lead Tool Into a SaaS Opportunity
Gault Family Companies had an aging lead system, deep home-services expertise, and a chance to modernize internal software into a product for businesses like theirs.
May 30, 2026
Rebuild or Repair Your MVP?
A messy MVP does not automatically need a rewrite. The right call depends on what the current system is costing the business.
May 27, 2026
How to Rescue a Failed Agency Build
A bad agency handoff can leave founders with code, invoices, and no confidence. The rescue starts by separating blame from diagnosis.
May 24, 2026
What a Product Rescue Audit Should Tell You
A useful audit should not just list problems. It should tell a founder what to do next, what to avoid, and what risk the business is carrying.
May 22, 2026
The Worst Kind of Failure Looks Like Success
A team can hit the deadline, ship the feature, and still avoid the thing the business needed to learn.
May 8, 2026
Do Hard Things Before You Automate Them
AI and automation are most useful after you understand the work well enough to know what should disappear.
May 1, 2026
When the Rewrite Is the Responsible Move
BEST App Suite started as a mobile migration. Years of real user behavior taught us why a Rails PWA was the better product for people with traumatic brain injury.
April 18, 2026
Misunderstanding Technical Debt
Technical debt is not automatically bad. The real problem is when nobody remembers what the debt bought or when it has come due.
March 29, 2026
Client Anxiety Is Product Signal
An anxious customer is not always a delivery problem. Sometimes they are showing you where the product, process, or promise is unclear.
February 17, 2026
Marketplaces Do Not Start as Marketplaces
The cold start problem is not a technical problem first. It is the part of the business most founders have to solve by hand.
December 12, 2025
When an AI Project Needs a Rules Engine
Incentiviiz started with an LLM thesis. The real product needed a hands-on fractional CTO, deterministic software, and AI used in the right place.
September 18, 2025
Modernizing a Service Admin UI Without a Rewrite
A service admin panel had become hard to change. The fix was not a full rewrite, but an AI-assisted strangler migration from strange React patterns to predictable code.