I built an open-source documentation platform because the good managed option wanted ~$5k a year to host what is fundamentally a Markdown renderer. If someone else hosts your docs, you're renting your documentation.
Most MCP servers burn 50-80K tokens before the user even asks a question. Here's why, and three generation modes that fix it.
It's 2am. My fiance is asleep, my cat is snoring, and I'm waiting for a release pipeline. Notes on building a business, not a startup, while the house gets framed wall by wall.
I built an open-source network reliability monitor because my building gates the ISP, my Slack huddles drop on certain afternoons, and the property manager keeps blaming my modem. I needed evidence.
I open-sourced a deployment CLI in December. Then I tried to actually use it to ship 4 products. Here's everything that broke.
After 15 years, I still don't know most things. That's the point. Be bold enough to dive into what you don't know, ask questions at every level, and push for what you believe in.
KISS applies to fixing systems too. Spend the extra 5 minutes to make it maintainable, and learn to spot when those 5 minutes are secretly 5 months.
Pressing a button speaks a thousand words. Rewrites, migrations, bug fixes: none of it matters if non-technical people can't see why.
Dropped into an unfamiliar codebase? The process I use to get the lay of the land on any project: Makefiles, architecture docs, and AI tooling.
The existential threat to labor isn't large language models. It's physical-world automation, and it has very little to do with chatbots.
AI isn't a bubble. It's big tech finally deploying tens of billions in capital that sat idle for years.
Startups should probably start with prompts. The honest tradeoffs between RAG, classical NLP, and raw GPT calls, and when each one actually earns its complexity.
I built an open-source deployment orchestrator because I had a monorepo with Cloud Run containers, Cloud Functions, Lambda, and a frontend. I didn't want 5 different infra tools.
Unless you're building the next TikTok, scale isn't your problem. The math most startups ignore, when containers beat serverless, and how to avoid architecture astronaut syndrome.
What I learned about monorepos from Meta's massive codebase, AWS's polyrepo architecture, and migrating SID from 15 repositories to one.