The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday on JustPaid, a 9-person Mountain View startup. They used OpenClaw and Claude Code to stand up seven AI agents that write code, review it, and run QA around the clock. In one month: 10 major features shipped. Each one would have taken a human engineer a month or more. This story is getting passed around as proof that the autonomous engineering team is h
MCP vs Skills: a practical decision guide for builders I need my agent to do X. Skill or MCP? If you build agents on Claude or anything MCP-compatible, this is the question that actually matters. The two patterns get pitched as alternatives. They are not. They solve different problems. Most production agents need both. Here is the decision rule, the framing for each, and the anti-patterns I keep
In March 2026, a rogue AI agent at Meta triggered a Sev 1 security incident. Sensitive company and user data was exposed to unauthorized employees for nearly two hours. The agent held valid credentials. It operated inside authorized boundaries. It passed every identity check. And yet. Identity and Access Management answers one question: Is this agent who it says it is? It doesn't answer: Was this
I shipped gni-compression to npm two days ago. One of the first questions I got (from myself, running benchmarks at midnight): does it work on anything other than chat data? Short answer: not yet. Long answer: I found out exactly why, and it led me somewhere more interesting than I expected. After the npm launch I ran GN against Silesia — the standard general text compression benchmark suite. Dick
Introduction Picture two doctors updating the same patient record at the same time - one in São Paulo, the other in London. Both are offline. When connectivity returns, whose changes prevail? This is not a hypothetical. It is the everyday reality of distributed systems: multiple nodes, no shared clock, no guaranteed network. The conventional answer has long been locking - one node waits while an
I keep seeing the same argument about AI making us dumber. It's the same argument people had about search engines, and before that books. The usual response is to point at history and say "every generation panics, every generation was wrong, relax." I think that response is half right, and the wrong half is what bothers me. Tools change what we bother to remember. The people who'd trained their wh
The Problem Nobody Talks About AI can write code, generate content, analyze data, design systems, and manage projects. It's getting better every month. The natural question: what's left for humans? The wrong answer: "AI will replace us." The right answer is uncomfortable: stop picking the best AI. Run multiple AIs in competition, and become the judge. Three rules, learned the hard way: Multiple
A few years ago I solved 200 LeetCode problems and still froze on Mediums I hadn't seen. The breakthrough wasn't another hundred problems. It was a different loop. A problem asks for the longest substring with at most K distinct characters. You've solved sliding window before. Maximum sum subarray of size K, done. Longest substring without repeating characters, done. This third one stalls you. Twe