Complexence
Complexity is the condition of the world. Complexence is the quality you bring to it: the capability of standing inside a system larger than yourself, seeing it whole, and still choosing. A word for the thing all my work has been about.
June 2026
54 posts
Compressed or Destroyed
The same tool that can fold a beginner's learning curve shorter can also erase it. AI compresses apprenticeship when it transfers expertise and destroys it when it lets people skip the repetitions that were quietly teaching them.
Botsitting
The subscription is the small line. The real meter is the time you spend feeding context, checking output, catching the confident mistake, and cleaning up the work that looked finished. That hidden labor has a name now: botsitting.
Rhetoric Is the Physics of Other Minds
If AWS is math and Kubernetes is physics, then discourse is the physics of other minds, the same live, empirical, pushes-back system, except the matter is a person and the latency is a blank stare. Why the studio and the arena are two different rooms, why the second one floods you, and how to build the faculty that levels the field.
The Jagged Frontier
AI is strong in one place and confidently wrong half a step over, and from the inside the two feel identical. The real skill is not prompting. It is knowing when to delegate, when to steer, when to verify, and when to think alone.
The Real Bill for AI at Work
The invoice for AI is the cheap part: a seat and some tokens. The real bill arrives in four ledgers: financial, attention, coordination, and development. Why AI makes the individual feel fast while the organization barely moves.
Just Enough Agreement: read your writes, and why not to over-buy consistency
Just Enough Agreement is Episode 3 of Learning Maps, a Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. Strong consistency is the expensive default, a cathedral when a sticky note would do. The skill is buying the cheapest guarantee the story actually needs: read your writes, monotonic reads, session consistency. Hand drawn on a napkin, narrated by two cloned voices, scored with a 14 Hz focus layer. CC BY 4.0.
The Patient Part
My head does not run in a line, it runs in branches. A tool arrived that does the exact part I cannot do and amplifies the exact part I already do too much. On building with an agent when your attention has its own ideas.
MAYA: an Alan Watts hall-of-mirrors song where a stick figure dances inside the illusion
MAYA is Song 09 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the convincing illusion of separation: lift one mirror, another one lights, and each reveal hides one more until the audience is you. So this one is a literal hall of mirrors, and the Plan 9 bunny dances inside it on a real skeleton rig over a proper EDM score with an anthem hook. CC BY 4.0.
The Dial: quorum, R plus W greater than N, and tuning consistency by counting
The Dial is Episode 2 of Learning Maps, a Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. Consistency is not on or off. It is a dial you set by counting: with N copies, when your reads plus your writes are greater than N, a read is forced to overlap a write and see the latest truth. Hand drawn on a napkin, narrated by two cloned voices, scored with a 14 Hz focus layer. CC BY 4.0.
AWS Is Smaller Than It Looks
AWS is taught as two hundred services. Underneath it is a handful of primitives, and every service is a frozen answer to a distributed-systems trade-off. The map I built studying for the SAA-C03, and the two questions that decode any new AWS service.
The Forced Choice: CAP, PACELC, and the trade every database already made
The Forced Choice is Episode 1 of Learning Maps, a new Napkin Films series that turns system design into story. A storm takes down the phone line between two librarians, and what happens next is the deepest fact in distributed systems: the CAP theorem, its honest twin PACELC, and the trade every database has already made. Hand drawn on a napkin, narrated by two cloned voices, scored with a 14 Hz focus layer. CC BY 4.0.
The Language of Sound: a six-part series on how music is actually built
A six-part series on how music is actually built, from a single waveform up to how a machine writes a song. Narrated by Der Gouverneur, every frame drawn by the real audio. Season One is complete.
The Language of Sound: A Field Guide for Making Music
I could already make sound. I could not name it, and you cannot ask for a thing you cannot name. So I asked my music engine for a map. This is that map: sound built in altitudes, and the words that let you climb it.
Directing AI Agents Across Thirty-Three Repositories
There are thirty-three repositories in my workspace, and I cannot hold more than two of them in my head at once. They sit side by side in one folder, but it is not a monorepo. Each is its own indepen...
Putting a Password on a Static Site With One CloudFront Function
A static site has no server to check a password, which is fine right up until the day you need one. My staging site is the problem in miniature. It is a full mirror of production, except it also carr...
Reading My Own Handwriting With an AI That Can Actually See
Tesseract could not read a word of it. I have years of handwritten journals, the actual paper kind, and I wanted them on this site. The obvious first move is optical character recognition, and the ob...
I Compiled My Whole Blog Into One File at Build Time
There is a 4.8 megabyte TypeScript file in my repository that I did not write. A script writes it, on every build, and I commit the result into git like it was mine. Most build advice would tell me th...
I Wrote a Linter That Strips the AI Tells From My Own Writing
The em dash is the easy one. I can catch every em dash I will ever type with about nine lines of shell, and I do, on every commit. The script walks my published posts and the book chapters and fails ...
TOCCATA RAVE: Bach builds the cathedral, Plan 9 breaks on the floor
Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, grown into EDM and turned into a dance floor. Plan 9 breaks to it on a bone skeleton while OG Bobby Johnson works the corner piano. One organ, one rave, two performers.
How I Gave CloudFront a Content-Security-Policy Without Blanking My Own Site
A strict Content-Security-Policy on a static site allowlists inline scripts by hash. Change one script, forget to update the hash, and every page renders blank. The incident that taught me, and the deploy guard that ends it.
I Built a Live Map of My Own Blog
I write constantly about giving complex things a map and a vocabulary. My own blog did not have one. So I directed an agent to read the site as a graph, and the first thing the map did was catch me. A build log, a deliverable, and what I hope to learn as I improve it.
Agent Mode vs Autonomous Mode: The Difference Is Who Closes the Loop
Agent mode and autonomous mode get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. The difference is who closes the loop: you, after every task, or the system, on a schedule. A working engineer's disambiguation.
How I Use AI as a Senior Engineer: Where the Day Actually Goes
Not a tools list. The tools changed three times this year; what changed underneath is where the hours go: specs in the morning, batch review in the afternoon, and the judgment work that never left.
My AI Code Review Workflow: Review the Change, Not the Typing
The code got cheap. The review did not. Here is the review workflow I actually use when AI agents write most of the diff: three passes, an adversarial second agent, and the discipline of reading what ships.
SAME NERVE: an Alan Watts mirror-song where pain and pleasure share one wire
SAME NERVE is Song 08 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about pain and pleasure: the same nerve fires for both, and the suffering is the resistance, not the sensation. So the song is a literal mirror, the same melody and the same words harmonised first in C minor and then in C major, while a Plan 9 bunny walks the nerve like a wire and learns to ride the pulse it used to brace against. CC BY 4.0.
Napkin Films, Vol. 2: five new ChipForge scores, and Vol. 1 remastered
Napkin Films, Vol. 2 is out on Bandcamp: five instrumental scores synthesized entirely in ChipForge from numpy arrays, plus a full remaster of Vol. 1 through the same engine. No samples. No recordings.
Breathe. Then Prompt.
A freewriting companion to Working at the Frontier: breath as the one thing actually in my control, the anchor that keeps speed from becoming burnout near the forge. A small mantra for it: breathe, then prompt.
FAULT IN THE CODE: a study of Gasoline where the glitch is the glory
A Plan-9-flavored study of Halsey's "Gasoline." OG Bobby Johnson spits, the cyborg bunny Plan 9 answers in tune, and a deep Alpine philosopher says the quiet part out loud: the bug is the feature.
Working at the Frontier: What It Actually Feels Like
A field report from inside sustained agent-mode work: the heat behind the eyes, the way speed bends your sense of time, what it costs the body, and the practice that lets you build at the frontier anyway.
ONLY LIFE: a machine of coherent complexity, undone
The opposing view of coherent complexity. A cold blue machine of rings and gears and towers cracks, collapses, and reveals a warm breathing core of life that blooms to fill the frame. F minor trap, a Bavarian philosopher voice, and a Sanskrit chant of darkness into light.
Decan 8: Loyalty Is Not the Same as Staying
Procyon, the herald that rises before the Dog Star, teaches that loyalty is not the same as staying. Fidelity to what is alive in you can require letting go of what is already dead.
Making Complexity Legible: a beat-locked spit-rap on charting complex systems
Making Complexity Legible is Case I of The Cartographer of Complexity, a new Napkin Films series about Making Complexity Visible. The idea: you cannot make a complex system simple without deleting what made it work, so you do not shrink the sea, you learn to read it. A tidal-EDM spit-rap, Plan 9 and OG Bobby trading bars over recomposed Telemann, with a cartographer bunny who roams a sea that brightens as it becomes legible. CC BY 4.0.
The AI-Assisted Engineering HOWTO
A practical, plain-spoken manual for building software with an AI agent: the setup, the loop, context management, and verified Claude Code and Copilot commands. Written like the old Linux HOWTOs, by someone who runs it daily.
EGO IS AN INCH: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the self you can never grab
EGO IS AN INCH is Song 07 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the ego: an abstraction like an inch or a line of longitude, useful for measuring and impossible to pick up, because the thing reaching is the thing reached for. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over Mussorgsky's grotesque Gnomus reborn as Eb-minor EDM, while a Plan 9 bunny, recast as the inch itself, taunts from just out of reach. CC BY 4.0.
The Cognitive Cost of Modern Software Engineering
AI took the typing, and the cost of software engineering did not go away. It moved from the hands to the head and got heavier. The new scarce resource is your attention, and the new discipline is managing it.
Recursive DevOps
DevOps was always a feedback loop. The first one ran between people. The one worth building now runs the system back on itself, so every failure and every change makes the next one cheaper and safer. The recursion is the compounding.
Agent Mode Changes the Shape of Thought
Agent mode is not a faster way to type. It moves the unit of thought up from syntax to intent, turns you into a conductor of parallel work, and makes the real bottleneck the clarity you can hold in your head at once.
ATTENTION IS THE LOOM: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap where the loom does the dancing
ATTENTION IS THE LOOM is Song 06 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about attention: what you attend to becomes the cloth, and the rest falls through. The front and the back of the embroidery are both true, and the gap is the rhythm. This pass rebuilt the motion from scratch so the loom actually weaves and the camera dives through the cloth to its knotted back. CC BY 4.0.
THE WEB: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day you found out you are the web
THE WEB is Song 05 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about relationship: nothing stands alone, the figure is held up by the ground, and the dewdrop net reflects itself forever. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over a Bach Brandenburg canon, a web of voices that imitate and pull on each other, while a Plan 9 mirror-bunny answers from the other end of the loom. CC BY 4.0.
Microservices, Agents, and What I Am Building Next
Microservices used to be a tax a solo builder could not afford. AI agents change that math. Here is why I am drawn to the architecture for what I build next, and the discipline that keeps it from becoming a mess.
Agent Mode Feels Like the Iron Man Suit
The suit never replaced Tony Stark. It amplified him. That is the closest thing I have to a description of what it feels like to build software in agent mode, directing one or many agents and scaling your own thought and output.
THE GAME INSIDE: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the cosmic game of hide and seek
THE GAME INSIDE is Song 04 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the game of hide and seek that consciousness plays with itself. Life is a play. The central self is playing every part. The only rule is to forget you set it up. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over Bach's Goldberg Variations re-composed into G major EDM, and the Plan 9 bunny answers back as the player who keeps finding him. CC BY 4.0.
I Rebuilt This Whole Site in Agent Mode
This site was rebuilt from scratch by directing an AI agent, then migrated off cPanel onto AWS S3 and CloudFront. Here is what that actually looked like, the parts that worked, and the day a deploy script quietly deleted production.
ATE THE MENU: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day the map ate the land
ATE THE MENU is Song 03 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about symbols eating the substance they point at. The map became the territory. The page outranks the place. You wheel a cart of real food to the counter and grieve the thirty dollars of paper instead of the gold you are carrying home. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over Mussorgsky's Promenade re-composed into D minor EDM, with a German echo underneath. CC BY 4.0.
What Is Autonomous Mode? And When to Actually Trust It
Autonomous mode is when the agent runs the whole loop without you in it: plan, act, check, repeat, until the task is done or it gets stuck. Here is what that means, how it differs from agent mode, and where the real risk lives.
An AI Agent Workflow for Software Engineers That Actually Holds Up
A practical, repeatable workflow for building software with an AI agent: specify, delegate, verify, record. The loop I actually run every day, with the parts that keep it from turning into slop.
Making Complexity Visible: You Cannot Simplify the Ocean, Only Chart It
When a system gets too big to hold, almost everyone reaches for the same move: make it simpler. It is the wrong move. You cannot simplify the ocean. You can only chart it. This is about the difference between simplicity and legibility, why decisions quietly migrate to whoever holds the context, and how to make a complex system visible enough to navigate without pretending it is small.
Claude vs Copilot for DevOps: A Practitioner's Comparison
I used GitHub Copilot in VS Code for a long time, always with Claude underneath. Then I moved most of my work to Claude Code. Here is the honest comparison for DevOps and infrastructure work, from someone who ships with both.
Run Your Life Like Software
Life Ops is running your life as a deliberate system, designed the way you design software: observe before acting, choose responses over reactions, build systems that make the good path the easy one, and version the whole thing like code.
What Is Agent Mode? A Working Engineer's Definition
Agent mode is when you stop typing code and start directing an AI that reads your codebase, writes the change, runs the tests, and reports back. Here is what it actually is, how the loop works, and when to reach for it, from someone who ships production systems this way.
How to Live Coherently Inside Complex Systems
Coherent complexity is what you get when a complex system is made legible without being made simple. You do not reduce it. You map it, until you can move through it on purpose. A field guide to the practice, and the idea behind everything else I build.
THE GRAND TOUR: a two-voice film where the picture is the physics
A two-voice music film where the picture is the physics. A small AI crew raps the lecture, Pythagoras and the pure ratios and the golden mean, and then the maker's own voice takes the bloom. The visuals are the math, rendered as light, every pulse read straight from the track.
Masters of Doom by David Kushner: How Two Johns Built id Software
I finished the Masters of Doom audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton and it was marvelous. The two-founders, build-from-nothing, ship-relentlessly story of id Software stuck with me. I miss it already, the same way I miss Shoe Dog.