Writing
What shipped, and what it cost
Decisions, mistakes, and the reasoning behind both — written close enough to the work that it is still specific. Dated, so you can see how old it is.
Four words per line
A post page on a sibling product rendered its body text about four words wide on a phone. It had probably always done that. Nobody had ever opened it at 390 pixels.
- typography
- mobile
- testing
It took five attempts to scaffold this site
I have a generator that scaffolds a new product from a vision file. I ran it by hand instead of handing it to an agent, specifically so I could watch it fail. It took five attempts and surfaced six failure modes, and not one of them was written down anywhere.
- building-in-public
- tooling
- failure-modes
- agents
The llms.txt I shipped was wrong
I hand-wrote a machine-readable summary of a product from memory. It described capabilities that had not shipped, and it was wrong the day it went live. The fix was not proofreading.
- llms-txt
- honesty
- testing
Why this site exists
Most build-in-public writing is either hype with no numbers or numbers with no reasoning. This is an attempt at the third thing, and a note on what I have had to give up to do it.
- building-in-public
- meta