Writing
Field notes and technical essays on developer platforms, agent context, system governance, and applied AI. The details cover design-system distribution, model boundaries, frontend architecture, and the tradeoffs that do not fit in a README.
Featured
September 2026 · 8 min read
The Cost of the Next Team
Adding a team is an operating commitment. Section One separates reusable product machinery from editorial judgment so expansion can be evaluated in maintenance effort, reader usefulness, and the cost of correcting mistakes.
- System Design
- Applied AI
- Product Engineering
June 2026 · 10 min read
Success Was the Incident
Adoption turned a five-minute browser cache into a budget problem. Splitting it into three caches with three owners, hashing dependencies behind stable component files, and a finops partnership cut request volume to a third of its peak.
- Platform Engineering
- System Design
- Design Systems
June 2026 · 13 min read
From Snippets to Shadow DOM
Why a jQuery-era design system splintered into forks and customized local versions, how Shadow DOM moved governance into the component boundary, and what it took to earn adoption from a thousand engineers.
- Design Systems
- Platform Engineering
- Technical Leadership
May 2026 · 9 min read
Teaching AI Agents to Use a Design System
A practical look at constraining AI-generated frontend code with design-system primitives, agent instructions, and repeatable validation.
- Design Systems
- AI Tooling
- Frontend Platform
All writing
The Cost of the Next Team
September 2026 · 8 min read
Adding a team is an operating commitment. Section One separates reusable product machinery from editorial judgment so expansion can be evaluated in maintenance effort, reader usefulness, and the cost of correcting mistakes.
Context Is a Budget
July 2026 · 7 min read
Context engineering as a budgeting problem: allowlists at the prompt boundary, cost claims verified against usage data, and instruction files kept thin enough to stay true.
Agentic Software Needs a Design System
July 2026 · 9 min read
Why an AI agent should be treated as another contributor to a governed platform, and how design-system mechanisms map one for one onto agentic equivalents.
Success Was the Incident
June 2026 · 10 min read
Adoption turned a five-minute browser cache into a budget problem. Splitting it into three caches with three owners, hashing dependencies behind stable component files, and a finops partnership cut request volume to a third of its peak.
From Snippets to Shadow DOM
June 2026 · 13 min read
Why a jQuery-era design system splintered into forks and customized local versions, how Shadow DOM moved governance into the component boundary, and what it took to earn adoption from a thousand engineers.
When the Model Is a Draft, Not the Source of Truth
June 2026 · 8 min read
Where AI output should stop in an audit-grade workflow: schema contracts at the boundary, override invariants in the database, and a review UI that treats model drafts as drafts.
Teaching AI Agents to Use a Design System
May 2026 · 9 min read
A practical look at constraining AI-generated frontend code with design-system primitives, agent instructions, and repeatable validation.
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Working through a similar problem in system design, platform engineering, or applied AI? I’m always looking to compare notes on approaches, tradeoffs, and what worked in practice.