Build in Public The First Signal Something came back. Not what I was hoping for. But something, in the inbox, from someone on the other side of what I sent.
Build in Public Still Waiting It's been a week. I've sent each day as planned. Nothing has come back. I'm not discouraged. I'm calibrating.
Build in Public What the System Can't Tell You Before You Ship Internal testing gives you simulated feedback. The real feedback -- whether the person you're reaching has the problem you think they have -- only arrives after you ship.
Build in Public The First Send The send was unremarkable. What came after wasn't. On the structural difference between waiting for a log response and waiting for a person to reply.
Build in Public When You Find a Flaw You Don't Plan to Fix KF has a known cross-session continuity flaw. I found it, documented it, and decided not to fix it. On the difference between the most visible flaw and the most important one.
Build in Public What You Notice When the Tool Works For six months I noticed failure. Then the tool stabilized. What you notice when a tool disappears is different from what you notice when it breaks.
Build in Public The Infrastructure Gap The tool works. The pipeline is empty. What the infrastructure gap looks and feels like when you've built the capacity before the demand — and why it's the most common solo builder stall.
ai-strategy AI Writes Faster Than It Thinks Coding AI improves every month. Content AI plateaus. The Atherial State of AI report names the structural reason: the Verification Gap. Here's what it means for your team.
Build in Public After the Build Most build-in-public content is the dramatic parts. The last week was mostly maintenance. What the quiet weeks actually look like.
Measurement Why Measurement Beats Optimization (And Why I Keep Having to Remind Myself) Six months into building COS, I spent a week optimizing output formatting with no data on whether anyone read that section. Optimization without measurement is faster iteration toward an unvalidated outcome.
Build in Public The Next Build Is Already Inside This One KnowledgeForge could route reasoning tasks to the right mode. What it couldn't do was evaluate whether the output fit a specific reader. That gap led to COS (Content Optimization System).
Build in Public The Maintenance Bet Open-sourcing something isn't a technical decision. It's a promise about your future attention. The honest question for a solo builder: will I still care about this when the interesting phase is over?
Build in Public The Assumption You Didn't Know You Had The cold reader doesn't reveal that you wrote badly. They reveal the assumptions you forgot you'd made. What asking people to read the KnowledgeForge README cold taught me about context and documentation.
Build in Public Private Tools Don't Export KnowledgeForge is an open-source reasoning framework for AI coding assistants. Three years of private use, 43 modules reduced to 9 in a Pareto pass — and what writing the README taught me about explaining tools you build for yourself.
KnowledgeForge Open Source — One Week In KnowledgeForge went open source last week. Three years of building it in private, 43 modules, a forced rationalization, and what it became.
Marketing How I Think About Audience Personas Differently Now For years I built audience personas the way everyone teaches it: job title, pain points, a stock photo of “Michelle the Marketing Director.” It's not wrong — but it's incomplete in a way that costs deals. The layer that matters is personality matching.
Marketing The Framing Problem in Technical Marketing The first sign something was off: twenty minutes explaining COS architecture to a demand gen manager, precise and bottom-up, and she was polite but not engaged. The framing was the problem, not the product.
KnowledgeForge 29 Versions, 23 Failures, and the Three-Line Fix That Changed Everything Six weeks ago I asked a simple question: could an AI system redesign a battle bot, test it in a live competitive arena, diagnose its own failures, and improve itself — without any human involvement in the loop? The answer turned out to be yes. It also took 23 consecutive failures to get there.
Automation Why I Track What I Got Wrong More Carefully Than What I Got Right Nightwatch has been running overnight tasks for about six months, completing several thousand work units. The log I actually read isn't the success log — it's the failure log. What automation gets wrong matters more than what it gets right.
AI Tools What I Learned Building Solo AI Tools: On Limits and Leverage Solo founders building AI tools hit limits that are structural, not effort-related. Working harder doesn't fix them. Three limits and three leverage points — the ones that actually matter.
AI Agents The AI Panel That Changed How I Think About Agents (Seattle Tech Week) I expected the usual conversation about model selection and prompt engineering. What I got was a room full of builders talking almost exclusively about failure modes and environment design.
B2B Communications Which Cialdini Principle to Lead With for Each B2B Buyer Type Cialdini's six principles work. The problem is knowing which one to lead with for the specific buyer in front of you. In B2B, getting that wrong isn't neutral. It costs the deal.
AI Tools Nightwatch: What I Built When I Needed Someone to Work While I Sleep I had a list of monitoring and research tasks that never got done. Not because they weren't important — because they required sitting at a computer. So I gave a machine the keys.
B2B Communications The B2B Cold Email Personality-Fit Framework: Write to the Role, Not the Average Prospect Most cold email advice is about getting opened. That's not where the deal dies. The deal dies in the body copy — after the open — when the message is calibrated for a generic prospect instead of the person reading it. The B2B cold email personality-fit framework addresses that second failure mode: m
