essay · October 2026
A week on a server, seven worlds, and the best one measured against strong play: five pumpjacks full with no refinery, no splitters, steel carried by hand, one worm, and evolution that is mostly the clock. Then an hourly watch that finds flaws without me, and what a seed panel needs before its verdicts mean anything.
essay · October 2026
My own Factorio world, the rules a human player lives under, and about eighteen hours of commits: blue science, a biter nest cleared by turret creep, and the two things a person watching for thirty seconds caught that the bot could not.
essay · October 2026
The smallest unit of an idea that stands on its own: one page, six questions, and a named list of what it rests on — grown inside a MECE tree of everything, with an AI as the tutor that makes it practical.
essay · September 2026
Parallel agents burned 40% of a weekly quota in a day. A status-line script, one line of arithmetic, a two-hour check and a restart hook now spend the week evenly — by throttling concurrency, never quality.
essay · September 2026
One photograph, five passes at working out what is in it — silhouettes, then a fitted camera model, then map, Wikidata and LiDAR projected through it. Including the two confident answers that turned out to be wrong.
essay · September 2026
Design-as-code makes the geometry a program. The layer that decides whether it holds is provenance — which numbers other numbers depend on, read out of four unfinished machines.
essay · August 2026
The two classical ways to integrate an orbit — what each is good at, what each costs, and where the crossover sits, measured rather than asserted.
essay · August 2026
Parts 1 and 2 were one machine; this is five. What the method costs — where the time goes, and which instrument catches which class of error.
essay · August 2026
An agent that runs commands on your laptop runs them as you. Putting it in a container — and the one hole you can decline to punch.
essay · August 2026
A general model gives you plausible architecture. Connecting a curated, opinionated library over MCP changes where the conversation starts.
essay · August 2026
What is actually in 442 files, who decided any of it, and where it is weakest — including the parts I would rather not advertise.
essay · August 2026
From answers in a chat window to documents somebody acts on — decision records, design reviews, runbooks, and a diagram that carries its provenance.
essay · August 2026
How a design travels. A folder of correct files is not a design — and putting them on one page found problems the folder had been hiding.
essay · July 2026
A reaction-wheel inverted pendulum designed almost entirely by a language model — what it produced, how fast, and where it stopped being reliable.
essay · July 2026
The pattern, the plumbing, and the discipline that keeps a language-model-maintained wiki honest.
essay · July 2026
The additions beyond Karpathy’s gist — schema-as-code, computed staleness, contradictions as data, and a retrieval test harness.
essay · July 2026
On leaving NASA — what I’d taken for the summit of human spaceflight — and the question it couldn’t ask.