Notes

Notes from the field.

Patterns, lessons, and unfinished thoughts on technical leadership, AI systems, and building things that ship.

23 July 2026 · web3 · payments · fintech

438 million wallets, one app update

Stripe already owns stablecoin issuance, wallets, and a chain. Buying PayPal would put 438 million funded accounts one app update from Web3.
18 July 2026 · payments · temporal · distributed-systems

Never double-charge: the UPDATE is the lock

Fixed Temporal workflow IDs, an UPDATE that doubles as a lock, and fail-closed reconciliation: layering double-charge protection into a payments system.
7 July 2026 · ai · engineering · teams

Does every CTO need a skunkworks?

With agentic teams, two hackers can spin up five MVPs while a normal team ships one feature. The case for keeping a skunkworks in your back pocket.
28 May 2026 · ai · security · engineering

Containment beats permission

Coding agents should run unsupervised, but inside a dev environment that's safe to be wrong in. The agent boundary is the wrong line to defend.
26 May 2026 · business · pricing

Let the price do the migration

Most companies run a migration campaign to clear users off a deprecated API. Anthropic just tripled the price of theirs and let market forces do the work.
21 May 2026 · security · leadership · infrastructure

GitHub got hacked

GitHub had 3,800 internal repos exfiltrated via a poisoned VS Code extension. If your private repos have ever held a secret, rotate it today.
12 May 2026 · business · marketing

Marketing is the work

Brent Roose says PHP's biggest problem is marketing, not the tech. The same is true of almost every business that's quietly good at what it does.
8 May 2026 · ai · business

Reselling tokens isn't a business

OpenAI is reportedly burning $1.69 for every dollar earned, and Anthropic is already raising prices. If your AI business is mostly API markup, the price floor is coming for you.
6 May 2026 · ai · local-first

Multi-token prediction, on a small laptop

Google shipped multi-token prediction for Gemma 4. The headline 3x speedup is for big GPUs, but the edge-model drafters quietly target laptops like mine.
3 May 2026 · ai · engineering · leadership

Vibe coding isn't engineering

Engineers treat coding agents as smart junior devs. Vibe coders treat them as their CTO. The gap matters more than the AI hype suggests.
3 May 2026 · meta

Welcome to Notes

What this section is for, what to expect, and the loose rules I'm writing it under.

Notes from the field.

438 million wallets, one app update

Never double-charge: the UPDATE is the lock

Does every CTO need a skunkworks?

Containment beats permission

Let the price do the migration

GitHub got hacked

Marketing is the work

Reselling tokens isn't a business

Multi-token prediction, on a small laptop

Vibe coding isn't engineering

Welcome to Notes