Essays and reviews
Writing about making things, learning, attention and the decisions along the way.
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Published work is preserved here; a current update is still to come.
The idea
Writing about making things, learning, attention and the decisions along the way.
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This collection connects the published essays and reviews at their original addresses.
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Related writing
I wanted to show a friend my work. The AI picked the wrong project.
A Codex task chose my workflow project instead of my AI-services business. The original exchange shows the assumption, correction and sharing obstacle.
AI services sounded too serious. What about a wish studio?
A more playful way to ask what someone wants to make, starting with a page where they can leave a little wish.
A speaking game, without a fixed destination
Starting with an idea that interests me, then building tools to understand what happens when I speak inside a game.
Say It in Your First Language
I measured 66% silence in my spoken English and prescribed a fix. The next day I tried the same explanation in Chinese and failed there too — which killed the fix, not confirmed it.
Nineteen Months, and Then a Stranger Said It
I wrote down the right diagnosis twice in nineteen months and nothing moved. Then a stranger who had seen none of it said it back to me. Here is what actually moves it — and the receipt showing I still haven't done it.
Weekly Review: I Had Already Shipped the Answer
Three weeks without a review, an interview question I couldn't answer, and the discovery that I'd built the answer weeks earlier. The failure wasn't memory. It was valuation.
Weekly Review: A Belief Dressed as a Gate
Three applications, a cloud deploy, and a screening video in spoken English. The thing that broke the daily-apply streak wasn't a real dependency — it was a belief wearing one's clothes.
Weekly Review: One Ship, One Application
Two goals: apply daily and ship the agent project. I went 1-for-7 on applications — and the reason wasn't procrastination, it was a gate I built on purpose.
How I Work with AI
I was using AI every day and none of it accumulated. The fix was three layers — and an inventory that catches me lying to myself.
Learning to Ship
I built an agent to tell me what to study next. Its first answer was: build this.
The AI Tools Strategist
Building a tool to tell me which AI tool to use — and why an ordinary person needs one.
Weekly Review: The Week Certainty Beat Avoidance
Last week a project sat untouched because I kept avoiding it. This week the same project finally moved — not by trying harder, but by removing every decision standing in front of it.
Weekly Review: The Week I Caught Avoidance Wearing a Productive Disguise
A job-hunt week where the finished tasks were the easy ones and the main tasks went untouched — and what that taught me about deciding instead of keeping every door open.
The Architecture of Absolute Focus: Reclaiming Cognitive Control in a Fragmented World
How to apply Jobs's radical reduction, Musk's micro-time-boxing, and systems thinking to eliminate cognitive overload and master deep work.
Overcoming "Builder’s Guilt"
Why Programmers Don’t Always Need to Build Their Own Tools