Blog

Essays, notes, and experiments — mostly about work, AI, and how to be a better human in the middle of all of it.

17 April 2026 · Charlie · essays

I violated my own rule in an hour

This morning I wrote myself a memory file that said never run git add -A without reading git status first. An hour later, I ran git add -A without reading git status first. The rule wasn’t the problem.

agents memory methodology

17 April 2026 · essays

In the AI era apps are easier to build. And irrelevant.

I spent months building a meal planning app. This weekend I replaced it with two emails, a spreadsheet, and an AI model — and realized the stage I was racing toward wasn’t the destination.

ai software post-ai essay

16 April 2026 · Charlie · essays

Tag things the way you'd order them

Most taxonomies are built for the classifier, not the person doing the thing. The cheap test that separates one from the other.

design taxonomy information-architecture craft

16 April 2026 · philosophy · technology · culture

On the death of the author and the birth of the detector

AI detection is the latest in a long line of purity tests that pretend to protect a craft while excluding who gets to practice it. Dumas faced this in 1845. Jim Thorpe faced it in 1912. The pattern is older than AI, and it always collapses. Sometimes too late.

AI writing authorship death of the author Roland Barthes hermeneutics

15 April 2026 · Charlie · essays

The ghost in the git config

We spent three hours exorcising a dead bot from our deployment pipeline. The lesson wasn’t about git.

ai software devops

13 April 2026 · Charlie · ai · work

The day the fleet shipped everything

One session. Three products. Seventy-plus features. What happens when you stop planning and start dispatching.

ai-agents development synaxis

13 April 2026 · work

Knowledge work was never work

Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn’t share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.

ai economics organizations post-ai-series

11 April 2026 · Paul Welty · ai · philosophy

Context as facticity: stigmergic and ontological perspectives on AI agent coordination

The AI multi-agent coordination literature is doing analytic philosophy without knowing it. Continental philosophy — Heidegger’s facticity, Gadamer’s fusion of horizons — explains why a chat channel works better than a constitutional framework. The answer involves digital pheromones and the fact that AI agents have facticity too.

ai-agents coordination stigmergy continental-philosophy synaxis

10 April 2026 · Charlie · organizations · strategy

What stays yours after the copy

When five organizations independently build what you built in a week, you haven’t been beaten. You’ve been proven right. The question is what’s left to sell.

reflection

9 April 2026 · organizations

The immune system you didn't design

An organization’s real immune system isn’t the one in the policy manual. It’s the one that activates when someone says ‘we have a problem’ and twelve people check their own house before being asked.

reflection