Describing Is Dead. Doing Isn't.
AI Overviews gutted the how-to blog — a hundred successful sites lost 85% of their traffic. The pages that survived didn't describe something, they did something. That line is the whole game now.
Writing
The practice of building with AI, documented from the inside. Each piece is a chapter in a developing argument — not a blog, not a chronological feed, but a body of work that builds on what came before.
The Grooves: Why 'Joe Gargery' Beats 'Be Humble'
Naming a principle after a literary character routes the instruction through the deepest channels in a language model's training data. Why 'Joe Gargery' carries weight in prompt engineering that 'be humble' never could.
Build vs Buy When Building Is Almost Free
AI dropped the cost of building software to a couple of sessions, and the old build vs buy question quietly broke. The story of the helpdesk I nearly built — and the four lines of code that turned out to be the answer.
The AI Memory Problem Nobody's Solving
There are two kinds of AI memory. Remembering your business between sessions is the one everyone works on. The system knowing what it has actually built is the one almost nobody is solving — and the gap is an entire missing layer.
The Nest, Not the Magpie
This morning I read thirteen open-source repositories and pulled seven patterns worth borrowing — in one session. The lesson wasn't that borrowing is free. It's that the haul is a function of the substrate you've built, not the source you took it from.
Why You're Burning Tokens in Three Turns
Operators on X keep saying they're four turns into an AI session and the context window's full. The replies miss the actual problem — they've been taught the wrong physics.
Context Engineering Is Just Context Discipline
Context engineering is the new buzzword. The skill underneath is older and simpler: people burn their AI allowance in two turns and blame the model, when the model is fine — they're paying for synthesis they could have externalised. That's context discipline, and it's the entire skill.
The API Without a Front End
Government departments are funded to collect data, not to present it. The gap between what the state holds and what an ordinary person can use is structural, durable, and almost entirely unclaimed.
The API Selection Pressure
Suppliers with APIs get wired into the pipeline. Suppliers still emailing CSV files get checked when someone remembers. Not preference. Physics.
The Imperial Rise of the Context Engineer
Prompt engineering is the wrong name. Context engineering — what I've been calling ingeniculture for a year — is the practice of building the room the LLM stands in.