Essays, technical articles, and thoughts on building sovereign systems.
Eighteen human product evaluators ran the same evaluation prompt through their AI tools. The writeups were sharper than any call. That feedback reshaped the product’s positioning — and then its acquisition flow. The homepage now asks agents to evaluate, not humans to sign up.
I shipped eleven Neotoma releases in the first five weeks after the developer release. The CLI now works on other machines, unblocking onboarding. The MCP server is stable enough for daily agent use. The database can survive operator mistakes. Here is what changed and why.
The debate over AI maps onto a question the Enlightenment never resolved. Rousseau said tools corrupt us. Condorcet said they perfect us. Nietzsche said both miss the point. Technology is a test of character, and the only honest answer is what you become in the encounter.
I accidentally overwrote my production Neotoma database and dropped from 6,174 observations to 84. I got nearly all of it back. The recovery worked because Neotoma's architecture stores observations as an append-only log and recomputes entity state from that log.
Narrative FOMO followed me from crypto to AI. At Leather, the Ordinals rush felt like real demand. At Neotoma, every memory-related tweet triggers the same scramble. I've lived both ways a narrative can break your product. Borrowed signal has a term limit.
The people who embrace AI encounter its problems more directly than anyone. But they also have the most faith that humans can work through them. The real skepticism isn't about the machines.
I overhauled the Neotoma site. The old single-page wall of text is now a visual presentation backed by documentation, tool-specific integration guides, and architecture deep dives—driven by what testers said and where they got stuck during the developer release.
The structural pressures that underpin my work, and what would invalidate them as the AI industry evolves.
Creation, whether a startup or a blog post, is a continuous habit of revealing your inner world and tuning into what comes back. The MVP is a continuum. So is everything else.
I joined Blockstack in 2018 for the off-chain developer tools. Over seven years I watched token economics reshape the product direction, push the perceived moment of value perpetually into the future, and replace empirical product development with narrative-driven roadmaps.
Claude and ChatGPT now offer memory for free, but what they store are profile snippets, not the details of what you actually worked on. My testing showed stale exports, one-shot access, and platform-gated portability. That is why I am building a truth layer underneath.
I built an agentic stack to dogfood Neotoma and accelerate my work. A private monorepo with 12+ MCP servers where I cowork with AI agents daily. Neotoma provides the structured memory underneath, letting agents build on prior work across every session.