Field notes on building software that holds up.
What separates a build that ships well from one that gets quietly rebuilt by the next team sixteen weeks later. Written for the founders deciding what to build, who to hire, and whether the dev team in front of them knows the difference.
The Real Cost of Skipping a Discovery Sprint
You never skip discovery. You only choose whether to answer the questions in a document, where changing your mind costs a conversation, or in code, where it costs a refactor and a data migration.
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Where Vibe-Coded Apps Actually Break: The Five Failures, Ranked by Frequency
There is now real data on how AI-generated applications fail. Five failure classes, ranked by measured frequency rather than opinion, with the studies attached and the weak numbers flagged as weak.
5 Things I'd Check Before Putting an AI-Generated App Into Production
One developer, one account, a good connection, an empty database. That is the only condition your app has ever been tested under, and it is the exact condition that hides everything on this list.
Free as in Puppy: The Real Cost of the Internal Tool You Built in a Weekend
Writing the code got cheap. Owning the code did not. The internal tool you built in a weekend is free the way a puppy is free.
They Say AI Writes the Code Now. Their Own Interviews Say Otherwise.
Anthropic's CEO said AI would write 90% of code within six months. Anthropic's own hiring policy tells candidates not to use Claude. That gap tells you more about what AI actually changed than any keynote does.
The Senior Engineer You Never Had in the Room
Senior engineers are finding it harder to slow bad ideas down before they ship. Most solo founders never had that voice in the room to begin with, and AI tools make it easy to not notice the gap until the rebuild.
The Edge Cases Are the Product
Every user who stopped trusting your app didn't hit a missing feature. They hit an edge case you never handled.
The Hard Part of GenUI Isn't Generating the UI
GenUI frameworks can assemble a UI from a model response. That's the easy part. The hard part is intent, state, and guardrails: the engineering layer between what the user said and what the app does.
What Is a Product Blueprint? The Fixed-Price Sprint That Decides What to Build
Most software projects fail before a line of code is written. A Product Blueprint is the planning sprint that decides what to build, what it will cost, and whether to build at all, before you commit development budget.
The New Software Economics: Cheap Code, Expensive Attention
Code is no longer the moat. As AI collapses the cost of building, the scarce resource shifts to attention earned through solving meaningful problems.
AI Can Write the Code. It Still Can't Tell You What to Build.
The risk in 2026 isn't that AI can't write code. It's that we are writing code faster than we can think. Why translation, system design, and precision are the new premiums.
The Difference Between Working Software and Production Software
Every developer tests their own code like it's made of blown glass. QA testers bring a sledgehammer. That relationship is the only thing standing between your app and a Friday night production crisis.
How to Build an App People Actually Use
Three mental models for building something people actually open: bucket of water, pitcher plant, and why the MVP is dead.
Hiring an App Developer? Two Questions Every Founder Should Ask First
Two diagnostic questions cut through every dev shop pitch. Most app builds fail because the founder picked a team that could ship code but could not engineer software.
Vibe Coding 16 Weeks Later: The Hidden Cost of Building Software on AI Vibes
Vibe coding looks fast in week 1, fragile in week 8, and unrebuildable by week 16. The cost is not burnout. It is poor architecture catching up with you.
Working Code Isn't Production-Ready Code: What AI Misses When It Writes Software
An LLM doesn't care if your loop is O(n²). It doesn't care if your dependency has a known vulnerability. It is completing a pattern, not engineering a system. Here is the gap that matters.
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