Essays
The Best Way to Learn Might Be Starting at the End: Writing a Proof in Lean
AI leveraged learning lets you start with the application at the end. Curiosity guides what you learn, fundamentals backfill when you need them.
Essays
Essays
Doing More Customer Interviews Won't Make You Better At Them
Founders and product managers fail at customer development, even when they're consistently talking to users. But this is less from conducting too few interviews and more from a missing feedback loop. The art of posing the right question is counterintuitive and cognitively taxing, so founders can’t analyze
Essays
Three ways I learn with AI
"You don’t `learn` from a chatbot. You consume...They’re spewing slop and people are gobbling it up." No. You’re holding it wrong. You can definitely learn from LLMs. It has to be with critical thinking.
Essays
What is Algebraic about Algebraic Effects?
what does the word "algebraic" mean when used in the context of programming langs? - a random tweet I'd wondered the same thing about "Algebraic Effects", and was excited to find a talk on YouTube titled What's Algebraic About Algebraic Effects and
Essays
The Hidden Scaffolding Behind Production Vibe Coding
I’m not near a level where it’s 10k LOC per day, but the volume of commits is noticeably higher w/ Claude/Codex now. Back in Feb/Mar when Claude Code came out, I was writing an implementation of DBSP (incremental computation with some mathy stuff) and I couldn’
Essays
Elm should have had Algebraic Effects
While the world has moved on from Elm, I still think about its simplicity a lot and how that was achieved, and what gaps there were in its design. The gaping weakness I'll talk about today was also the result of its strength. Elm apps have a single
Essays
System eval with Obsidian and Claude Code
Lately, I've been experimenting with a different system eval stack than what you might normally hear about: Obsidian and Claude Code. Typically, Obsidian is used as a personal note taking app/knowledge base and Claude Code is used as a coding agent. I'm misusing both to
Essays
Programming After AI: Why System Boundary Taste Matters
Since coding agents came on the scene, a subset of programmers panic about AI replacing their jobs, but I think they're panicking about the wrong thing. The fear seems focused on the mechanical aspects—will AI write better functions than me? Will it debug faster? Will it remember
Essays
Getting vibe coding to work for me
I bounced off of Cursor a couple of months ago. It was good having code in context in the sidebar, a leg up from cutting and pasting, but I found its agent UI confusing and it made odd edits. In addition, when I left it open for a week, it’
Essays
Elm as target language for vibe coding
Having been a fan of functional programming and following the breadcrumbs of reactive systems, it's not surprising that I'm a fan of Elm, and had experience building different systems in it. It's too bad that enthusiasm for Elm didn't last until vibe
Essays
Types as a design tool
There are some programmer that love types and there are others who eschew them. When reasonable people fall on both sides, it's good reason to look for a latent variable that better explains the underlying motivation or cause. Latent variables, by definition, are hard to measure or observe
Essays
When declarative systems break
A couple of months ago, I had to reload everything I knew about reactivity back into my head. I discovered that I missed a large corner of the development around unstructured reactivity, by way of Signals. From arguments about signals vs. functional components on Twitter and in post comments, it