Essay11 min read
Adding to DNA Is a Decision. Adding to Code Is Just Typing.
When AI makes execution cheap, the scarce resource is not typing. It is deciding. The discipline of the next era is knowing the difference.
Insights
Thinking on software identity, agentic development, and the engineering decisions that persist.
Essay10 min read
Beck, Karpathy, and Willison Are Saying the Same Thing
Beck, Karpathy, and Willison arrived at the same conclusion independently: AI agents need persistent, structured specifications. The vocabulary differs. The diagnosis doesn't.
Essay12 min read
Context Engineering Is Not Enough
Context changes per request. Identity persists across sessions, tools, and team members. Context engineering without identity engineering is a database query without a schema.
Essay12 min read
Non-Human Identity Management for AI Coding Agents
Your AI agents have credentials, make API calls, and access production data. They're operating on borrowed human identities with no scoped permissions. That's an identity crisis.
Essay14 min read
Code Is Ephemeral. Identity Is Permanent.
Twitter rewrote Ruby to Scala. Uber's microservices have a 1.5-year half-life. The code is always temporary. The question is what persists.
Essay12 min read
Documentation Is Dead. Long Live Identity.
The $6 billion documentation industry is solving the wrong problem. You don't need better docs. You need software that knows what it is.
Guide15 min read
What Is Spec-Driven Development? The Definitive Guide
Spec-driven development is a paradigm where specifications are the primary artifact and AI agents generate code from them. Here's how it works, who's doing it, and where it's heading.
Essay14 min read
Software DNA: The Primitive Nobody Built
Software DNA is a declarative identity layer that defines what software is, what it should do, and what constraints it must honor. It's the primitive the industry has been building around without building.
Manifesto18 min read
Your Software Doesn't Know What It Is
Software runs the financial system, the power grid, the hospital. It has no persistent identity. In an era where 41% of code is AI-generated, that's existential.