Posts about tools
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The Template Is the Schema
Seven PyPI releases of a CV generation tool in one afternoon taught me that template-guided synthesis lives and dies by what the template already contains.
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4 Principles for Agent-Facing CLI Design
Most advice about making CLIs agent-friendly is just good CLI design. Only four principles are actually agent-specific.
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The primary-source tax
Multi-engine search agreement is not primary-source verification. A cautionary tale about hallucinating reference content from consistent secondary summaries.
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Ten Things I Learned From the Agent Skills Gold Rush
A day of reading skill repositories taught me less about the skills themselves than about how much I'd missed of the surrounding ecosystem.
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What I Found Evaluating 5 Agent Skill Repos
Five skill repositories, a day of reading code, and a significant correction I had to make the same afternoon.
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Tools Are Instruments, Skills Are Recipes
The tool/skill/agent distinction isn't just compression ratio — tools are instruments, skills compose them with judgment. Same thing only at the leaf.
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The Constitution Eats Itself
Design for the failure modes of your medium, not the capabilities. Then watch the rules dissolve themselves into programs.
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Taste Is the Metabolism
Tool descriptions were just the first thing to evolve. Everything in an agent's context window is a genome under selection pressure — and taste decides what counts.
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The Semantic Consumer
Traditional computing has two consumers: humans who look and programs that parse. LLMs are a third kind — they read.
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The Missing Metabolism
We build agent tools the way medieval farmers bred crops — by hand, by instinct, one season at a time. There's a better loop.
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Your Wearable Doesn't Know You're Tired
Oura gave me a normal stress score after three 12-hour creative marathons. Wearables measure your body, not your brain.
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Show Up with the Machine, Not the Idea
The highest-leverage consulting prep is building the tool before you need it
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The Annotation Model: What AI Journaling Gets Right
Most AI writing tools want to chat with you. The better model is annotation — AI that reads what you wrote and leaves margin notes.
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What AlphaSense Charges Ten Thousand Dollars For
I built an AI landscape intelligence pipeline for zero marginal cost. Here's what it does and what it can't.
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Redundancy Is the Only Honest AI Research Strategy
I ran the same question through 6 AI tools and scored them against peer-reviewed evidence. Every tool got something wrong that another got right.
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The Bootstrap Problem in AI Tooling
You need the tool to build the tool. The answer is: build the dumb version first, use it once, then have it build its replacement.
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The Orchestration Layer Is Knowledge, Not Code
Multi-agent AI orchestration frameworks are commodity. The competitive advantage is knowing which agent to use when, what breaks, and how to recover.
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The Accidental Life OS
I spent an afternoon researching AI tools for personal life management. The conclusion was that I should stop looking.
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The Case Against Knowledge Management Systems
Most PKM tools are procrastination with better aesthetics. The problem isn't the software — it's that filing a note feels like understanding it.
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The Calibration Trap
The comfort trap is about effort. This one is about epistemics — and it's harder to see.
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The Comfort Trap
The right test for any AI interaction isn't 'did it help me?' but 'am I more capable after it?'
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The Personalised System Era
AI coding agents didn't just make developers faster. They changed who gets to have a bespoke system.
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Let the OS Schedule, Let Your Tool Dispatch
The moment I stopped building scheduling into my tools, everything got simpler.
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The Experiment Loop Without the GPU
Andrej Karpathy's autoresearch project is being read as a demo of what H100s can do overnight. It's actually a discipline for doing rigorous work on anything measurable.
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I Didn't Mean to Kill My Todo App
A coding assistant quietly made three productivity apps redundant. Not by replacing them — by making context collapse the boundaries between them.
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Exa Indexes WeChat
WeChat is supposed to be a walled garden. Exa didn't get the memo.
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The Problem With Clever Browser Automation
The most sophisticated solution to a problem is usually a sign you haven't found the right abstraction yet.
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The Failure Mode of AI Advice Isn't Hallucination
The failure mode of AI advice isn't hallucination. It's that it agrees with you. Here's the architecture that fixes it.
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Building My Own Consulting Toolkit Before Day One
Most consultants arrive at a new firm and learn their tools from colleagues. I tried something different.
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Claude Code is Not a Coding Agent
Why I use Claude Code for everything except coding: cognitive compiler for strategy, decisions, and understanding.