Building in Public

Transparent engine with colorful neon wires and cyberpunk workshop background

The Marginal Return of Intelligence (And the Marginal Return to It)

One week ago I announced Grazier Ventures and Aqen.ai. Since then I’ve been asked a version of the same question about a dozen times: how are you actually going…

Diagram showing stages of AI startup ecosystem including idea, funding, development, launch, growth, and revenue

The Builder’s Bet

I’ve spent 15+ years building things inside other people’s companies. This week I started building one of my own. It’s called Aqen.ai. You bring the idea. Aqen brings everything else…

Futuristic city at night with neon signs, data pipelines connecting city hall and neural core, people with umbrellas.

I Trained a Small Language Model on My City’s Government Documents

A few weeks ago I shipped a phone app that lets residents measure the speed of cars on their street. The thing I learned building it wasn’t about…

I Vibe Coded a Civic Tool

Everyone’s vibe coding the next todo app. The next AI wrapper. The next SaaS dashboard that solves a problem three other SaaS dashboards already solved. I vibe coded…

Can AI Solve the Four Burner Problem?

In my last post, Awe in an AI World, I wrote about the reclaimed time that AI is creating and the question that keeps me up at night in…

Awe in an AI World

I’ve spent most of my life implementing systems at scale, watching engineering teams transform how they work (pre- and post-AI), and having thousands of conversations about what it…

The notebook, in your inbox.

The notebook, in your inbox. Every Tuesday, one essay on AI implementation, engineering leadership, or the operator-to-founder transition. No digests, no roundups, no AI-generated news — just the ideas I'm actually working through.