Today we released Grok-4 weights under an Apache 2.0 license. The model is competitive with the frontier on reasoning and coding, behind on long-context recall, and ahead on Chinese and Spanish. Here's the thinking. Open weights are good for the field Closed labs argue that…
Leverage is reproducible. Luck is not. Founders confuse them constantly, especially after a win, and especially in their second company. Specific knowledge, accountability, and judgment compound. Distribution, timing, and the right introduction at the right party do not — they…
The on-prem migration is done. Six weeks of pain, eighteen months of savings. Here's the cost breakdown, the hardware we chose, and the two things we'd do differently if we restarted today.
Every line of code is a liability. Every meeting is a tax. Every feature is a support burden. Simplify aggressively.
Eighteen months ago we ran our first eval harness against a handful of agent prototypes. Today twelve of those prototypes are in production serving real users. Here's what survived the transition and what didn't. Tool selection beats model selection We assumed the model would be…
Knowing what not to add to the kernel is worth more than knowing what to add. Taste is the compiler for intuition.
AI generates everything competent. The floor rose. Taste — editorial decisions about what to leave out — is now the scarce skill. Some notes on how to train it.
We are spinning up eval harnesses across code, agents, and tool-use. If you run benchmarks in prod, please share which tasks break today so we can target them. Reasoning + long-horizon planning are priority.
ORM-free continues to pay dividends. The query plan is the program. If you can't read an EXPLAIN, you can't debug your app.
Vite 7 ships next month. The headline is the new dev server, which is a near-complete rewrite of the module graph and HMR pipeline. Here's the why and the how. The old graph couldn't scale Vite 4 and 5 used a flat module map keyed by URL. It worked beautifully for projects under…
Three days, four wallets, two failed transactions, one accidental mainnet deploy. A grumpy tour of what modern web3 DX still gets wrong.
After the last cycle of exchange failures, hardware-wallet shipments are up 4x YoY. The UX is still terrible. Anyone building a consumer-grade recovery flow that doesn't require a seed phrase is going to win.
The best systems don't just work — they can be explained. If your protocol needs a 40-page whitepaper for a junior dev to follow, something is off.
Pulled together the tools 200+ AI engineers actually use day-to-day. Eval frameworks converged, observability is still fragmented, and structured-output is now a solved problem.
Nobody reads the books they think they should read. Abandon books shamelessly. Only read what holds your attention. Compounding only works if you keep showing up.
Letting the AI write them feels good but the diff-explaining muscle atrophies fast. The real value of the description is that you understand what you changed.
Six months ago we kicked off MDX Forum: a Reddit-style community surface built on top of our agency's design system. Today it's serving real traffic and we shipped 47 features along the way. Here's what worked. Design tokens are non-negotiable Every spacing, color, and…
With Verkle trees landing and execution proofs compressing nicely, stateless clients look realistic for Q3. Here's what changes for rollup teams and why light clients on mobile are now on the table.
The people who wait until they have something to protect always regret it. Self-custody is a habit, not a product.
Less noise on the timeline, more time with the team. The product always gets better when the people building it are less stressed. Obvious but easy to forget.
Rolldown is now the default bundler. Cold-start builds on a 3k-module app dropped from 8.2s to 1.4s. HMR is also meaningfully faster. Migration guide in the thread.
Oxc, Rolldown, Turbopack, esbuild — we converged on the right primitives. The differences from here are ergonomics and ecosystem, not performance.
PPR combines the best of static and dynamic on a per-route basis. The static shell streams first, then dynamic holes hydrate. We're seeing 30-50% TTFB wins on commerce apps without rewriting anything.
Everyone ships the happy path. Nobody ships error recovery. The companies that win next year will be the ones that make failure modes boring.
A year ago MDX was me and a Notion doc. Today it's 9 people and predictable retainers. Here's the hiring, pricing, and client-filter decisions that actually moved the needle.
Today we released Grok-4 weights under an Apache 2.0 license. The model is competitive with the frontier on reasoning and coding, behind on long-context recall, and ahead on Chinese and Spanish. Here's the thinking. Open weights are good for the field Closed labs argue that…
Leverage is reproducible. Luck is not. Founders confuse them constantly, especially after a win, and especially in their second company. Specific knowledge, accountability, and judgment compound. Distribution, timing, and the right introduction at the right party do not — they…
The on-prem migration is done. Six weeks of pain, eighteen months of savings. Here's the cost breakdown, the hardware we chose, and the two things we'd do differently if we restarted today.
Every line of code is a liability. Every meeting is a tax. Every feature is a support burden. Simplify aggressively.
Eighteen months ago we ran our first eval harness against a handful of agent prototypes. Today twelve of those prototypes are in production serving real users. Here's what survived the transition and what didn't. Tool selection beats model selection We assumed the model would be…
Knowing what not to add to the kernel is worth more than knowing what to add. Taste is the compiler for intuition.
AI generates everything competent. The floor rose. Taste — editorial decisions about what to leave out — is now the scarce skill. Some notes on how to train it.
We are spinning up eval harnesses across code, agents, and tool-use. If you run benchmarks in prod, please share which tasks break today so we can target them. Reasoning + long-horizon planning are priority.
ORM-free continues to pay dividends. The query plan is the program. If you can't read an EXPLAIN, you can't debug your app.
Vite 7 ships next month. The headline is the new dev server, which is a near-complete rewrite of the module graph and HMR pipeline. Here's the why and the how. The old graph couldn't scale Vite 4 and 5 used a flat module map keyed by URL. It worked beautifully for projects under…
Three days, four wallets, two failed transactions, one accidental mainnet deploy. A grumpy tour of what modern web3 DX still gets wrong.
After the last cycle of exchange failures, hardware-wallet shipments are up 4x YoY. The UX is still terrible. Anyone building a consumer-grade recovery flow that doesn't require a seed phrase is going to win.
The best systems don't just work — they can be explained. If your protocol needs a 40-page whitepaper for a junior dev to follow, something is off.
Pulled together the tools 200+ AI engineers actually use day-to-day. Eval frameworks converged, observability is still fragmented, and structured-output is now a solved problem.
Nobody reads the books they think they should read. Abandon books shamelessly. Only read what holds your attention. Compounding only works if you keep showing up.
Letting the AI write them feels good but the diff-explaining muscle atrophies fast. The real value of the description is that you understand what you changed.
Six months ago we kicked off MDX Forum: a Reddit-style community surface built on top of our agency's design system. Today it's serving real traffic and we shipped 47 features along the way. Here's what worked. Design tokens are non-negotiable Every spacing, color, and…
With Verkle trees landing and execution proofs compressing nicely, stateless clients look realistic for Q3. Here's what changes for rollup teams and why light clients on mobile are now on the table.
The people who wait until they have something to protect always regret it. Self-custody is a habit, not a product.
Less noise on the timeline, more time with the team. The product always gets better when the people building it are less stressed. Obvious but easy to forget.
Rolldown is now the default bundler. Cold-start builds on a 3k-module app dropped from 8.2s to 1.4s. HMR is also meaningfully faster. Migration guide in the thread.
Oxc, Rolldown, Turbopack, esbuild — we converged on the right primitives. The differences from here are ergonomics and ecosystem, not performance.
PPR combines the best of static and dynamic on a per-route basis. The static shell streams first, then dynamic holes hydrate. We're seeing 30-50% TTFB wins on commerce apps without rewriting anything.
Everyone ships the happy path. Nobody ships error recovery. The companies that win next year will be the ones that make failure modes boring.
A year ago MDX was me and a Notion doc. Today it's 9 people and predictable retainers. Here's the hiring, pricing, and client-filter decisions that actually moved the needle.