My Journey in UX, Design Systems, & Life

Every engineer knows the deal with technical debt. You take a shortcut to ship something today, and you pay for it later. The interest compounds quietly until one day a simple change takes a week, and nobody remembers why. I think I've been taking on a different kind of debt.

I haven't seen The Roots live since I lived in Berlin many years ago. That sentence covers more time than I want to think about. So when I heard they were coming to the Blue Note in LA, I immediately knew I wanted to attend. The band and the venue did not disappoint.

This weekend, I wired my website into the AT Protocol. It took an afternoon and one stubbornly old config file, and now my writing lives on the network itself.

Last month, a Cloudflare engineer used AI to rebuild a major open-source project in under a week. Cost about $1,100. It shipped to production. Around the same time, a different Cloudflare team used AI to fork another project and silently stripped out the security protections the original maintainers had spent years adding. That also shipped.…

Tailwind usage is at an all-time high. Revenue is down 80%. Documentation traffic dropped 40% over two years. AI didn't kill Tailwind. AI now picks Tailwind. Every prompt. Every team. Without anyone choosing. And the moment it picks something else, every codebase built on top of that decision is on its own.

Everyone's arguing about which AI tool writes the best code or generates the best images. Meanwhile, the companies building these systems are racing to ship faster, raise more, and consolidate more power than any tech cycle before them. And a small group of researchers, journalists, and engineers have been trying to get your attention about…

It's 4 pm on a Friday. I've approved my last PR of the week. I've reviewed more code today than I wrote. I got a lot done, or at least, the dashboard says I did. But I'm sitting here, and I can't think straight. Not in the dramatic, existential-crisis way. Just... tired. A kind of…

At some point, I stopped knowing what was on my Mac. A tool here, a dependency my agent dropped in there. Collectively, a mystery. I was losing track. To help, I created stockpile.

Everyone's building custom skills for their AI coding assistants right now. Commit helpers, linting rules, project scaffolding. Little markdown files that make Claude Code do things your way instead of the default way. I've been doing the same thing. But the more skills I wrote, the more I wanted them to follow me between machines…