💥 After years in the C-suite, I reopened VS Code and built an AI-native product—solo. Here’s what a few gritty weeks shipping code with AI teammates taught me. 👇

Why am I not watching Silicon Valley right now

Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? Grok explanation is ~close: “Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next. It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

The true test of AGI will be resolving all printer issues. Until then, color me doubtful.

In the end, all decisions come down to maximizing the outcome of energy utilization.

TDD is a path to productivity with AI coding tools. Done right, the results are impressive, agents are guided properly and results are much more predictable. Claude Code specifically does great with this approach.

Next.js and Auth0 don’t play well together. Thinking of jettisoning them both.

One of the most annoying Claude Code behaviors is excessive defensive programming that creates hard to find bugs.

Work on something that you can’t put down each day, that keeps you up late, that you wake up thinking about. Then grind and ignore most everyone.

Frontend and backend dev concepts created a 30 year old jail we’re all living in.

I don’t usually post “personal stuff” but here goes. Recently my dad passed away and I’ve taken some time to live through the grief, to be introspective, to reorient and to reset. To learn and improve. So I’d like to share a few things I learned from my dad. There is intrinsic value in meaningful, hard work. He lived the example of hard work well done. Focusing on the work itself, whatever you are working towards, has its own reward. It’s a two way relationship between us humans and work. And we benefit. We don’t just provide the effort, we also receive something back. While it may deplete our physical and mental energy, it strengthens us spiritually. Just the act of hard work well done activates some deeper intelligence, some deeper meaning. Yes, it’s good to orient and “work” towards an outcome or goal, but focus on the work, give it all of you in the moment. The reward will be greater than the effort. Lifelong learning. He never lost that childish curiosity which so many of us do as we get older. He was curious and he wasn’t afraid to be seen as ignorant or incompetent to learn something new. And he was always reading. Something that I have rededicated myself to doing. You only have control of yourself. You can’t control what happens to you but you can control how you react. I rarely saw him get flustered or lose his temper. Did he have emotions? Of course. Did he get depressed at times, probably. In the quiet moments alone did he doubt himself, did he break down, did he complain about the world, I’ll never know. He always seemed to be in control of himself in whatever situation and someone that others could and did look to. That is a quiet strength that others benefit from. Have fun. You can enjoy yourself in whatever you do and you can spread that to others. The big moments and the small. The work and the play. Whether we have fun or not is up to each of us. Life is short, as they say. Have fun and try to bring others along, enjoy the time we’re given. I’ve long known the concept that death is a part of life. I never truly understood what that meant until now. I miss you Dad.

The cloud is a tool, neither bad nor good. Over dependence on any one element, if it’s not your essence, is not going to end well. If AWS us-east-1 went down and your service went down it’s time to reevaluate your architectural decisions.

When you journey on a mission with meaning there are not enough hours in the day.

Ruthless prioritization. Time is most precious.

The arrow of time can only move forward because otherwise we would go insane.

We waited 15 years for iPad to give us Windows 3.

It is a beautiful concept, in every sense of the word.

And it’s regularly decreasing with an unknown budget.

Never make a promise after you’ve learned to talk.

This 50 year old human-machine interface needs to be replaced. Two generations of humans have been “trained” on it, but it’s not natural. We need a fresh approach that is much more natural and organic to interact with AI.

With AI tools Product can be 1, if you have a team of 1.