Build log

Technology moves.
The work tells you what matters.

Field notes on agents, software delivery, and the judgment it takes to lead through change.

A lavender ceramic reader with brass spectacles and an open notebook, perched on plum and parchment books
A little room for curiosity.
Latest field note

Eleven stars and back

Brian Chesky's eleven-star exercise and the business case are two halves of one round trip. Dream wide on one moment, then let the business case decide what comes back.

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Earlier notes

6 essays

  1. Smaller teams first

    When AI coding tools arrived, the constraint was the team leads. Shrink teams so leads can learn hands-on, grow again, then remove layers. Velocity rose more than 45%.

    agents

  2. The browse surface

    Chesky tried Airbnb on the agents people use. Walmart's chat checkout converted worse. ASOS still sends shoppers to look. The product is the browse surface.

    agents

  3. SpaceX bought Cursor. The interesting part is what shipped after.

    SpaceX closed Cursor (Anysphere) Aug 14. After close: Rollouts, Security Reviewer, Self-Hosted Machines, Origin — mapped to a circular SDLC. Operate and Learn still open.

    factoriesagents

  4. Same-day Sol and Opus — Opus at AA 58 is not your default

    Opus tops Artificial Analysis at 58; Sol 48, Luna 37. Same-day dual drop. Route on your harness and $/task — not Tuesday's Index. Gateway A/B without swapping keys.

    agentshitl

  5. Pace the frontier — and the agents you already shipped

    Amodei asks frontier labs to pace capability growth. OAI-HF, cheap near-frontier models, and Anthropic's hiring mix make the operator translation local: contracts, HITL, evals, and spend/send/mutate gates.

    factorieshitl

  6. How I'm setting up a personal agent team on Grok Bot

    I researched Grok Bot like a hire: FTE seat contracts, The Studio floor, labels, provisioning, site iteration, and what a $20 Cursor week actually cost.

    agentshitl