Essays

Field notes on rewiring delivery around AI.

One essay per week, Mondays. Each one is a pattern I've watched land — or fail to — inside a real engineering org. No newsletter, no feed-burner; bookmark the page or subscribe via RSS.

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  1. №005

    The Substrate Compounding

    Anthropic just paid over $300M to take Stainless off the board for OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Cloudflare. The first acquisition whose primary effect is subtracting capability from rivals. The model layer is now one of five.

    2026-05-22 9 min
  2. №004

    The Eval Reckoning

    Two GitHub releases, an interpretability paper, and a regulatory disclosure pattern in a ten-day window named the same admission: capability has commoditized faster than the ability to evaluate it. The differentiator is now eval.

    2026-05-22 7 min
  3. №003

    What the Operators See

    Every AI commentator with reach is inside: lab alum, researcher, builder, VC-adjacent. The operator chair is empty. A dispatch from the chair, in a month when the substrate shifted weekly.

    2026-05-07 8 min
  4. №002

    The Verification Gap: Notes on the SubQ 1M Launch

    A Miami startup just claimed a 1,000× compute reduction at 12M tokens with no weights, no technical report, and no way to check. The contrast with Mamba-3 is the actual story.

    2026-05-07 7 min
  5. №001

    The Watts War

    Anthropic just rented Elon Musk's flagship supercomputer ten weeks after he called them 'Misanthropic.' The deal isn't the news. The substrate constraint underneath it is.

    2026-05-06 7 min