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Complex systems run modern life: software, organizations, markets, families, AI. This site is one engineer-philosopher's work on making them legible enough to live inside without pretending they are simple. It holds engineering writing, AI-assisted development essays, philosophy, decanal journals, book reviews, films, music and a game in one place because those concerns belong together.
The territories
AI and engineering
Fifteen years of distributed-systems work; the last few of those running inside AI agent mode. Essays here are about what changes when the human is three abstraction levels above the code and still responsible when it breaks.
- How AI Is Changing Software Engineering · Cornerstone, 2026 field report
- DevOps Beyond Automation · Cornerstone, the career compound
- Agentic AI Development · Cornerstone, working in agent mode
- AI-Assisted Development Is Not Vibe Coding · Standalone essay
- AgentSpek: A Beginner's Companion to the AI Frontier · Book, free sample chapters + Amazon
Complexity and systems
Complex systems run modern life: software, organizations, markets, families, AI. The work here is about making them visible enough to navigate without pretending they are simple.
- Making Complexity Visible · Cornerstone, the thesis behind all of it
- Complexence · The skill under all of it: staying clear in systems too big to hold in your head
- Domain Cartography · The method: charting a domain you live inside
- A Loop Is a Path That Closes · The steersman had somewhere to go
- Gentler On-Ramps to Cybernetics · Reading the field that named the helmsman, from a cartoon to Ashby
Philosophy and the notebooks
What it means to be alive in a moment when machines are learning to think alongside us. Antifragility, cosmic perspective, consciousness, the long now. Less abstract than it sounds.
- Free Writing journals · Raw, unfiltered, sometimes strange
- Living with Antifragility · Cornerstone, gaining from disorder
- Review: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb · The frame underneath everything
- Review: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan · Cosmic perspective
Time and the decans
A 36-decan calendar that splits the year into 10-day cycles, traced through the brightest fixed stars. Ancient timekeeping, modern practice. Used as the temporal substrate for journaling, decision-making, and the rhythm of long work.
- The Decan Log (book) · On Amazon, also free to read here
- All decan journal entries · Star-by-star, in order
- What Is Decanal Journaling? · Cornerstone explainer
Books
Books that changed how I see things, written up so the reasoning is visible. Less "book report," more "how this rewired my thinking."
- The Library · Books and audiobooks, shelved by theme
- Review: On Writing by Stephen King · Why the freewriting practice exists
- Review: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan · On intelligence and what makes us human
Making things
Films, music and a live multiplayer game, built from code. No GPU farms, no stock media, no audio libraries. The constraint is the design.
- Why I Build Creative Technology · Cornerstone, the whole why
- All Napkin Films · Filterable catalog
- Play 7helm · A live co-op game, built in the open
- Subscribe on YouTube · @organicartsllc
- Plan 9, Napkin Films, Vol. 1 on Bandcamp · Album, five rap-EDM scores
- All projects · 7helm, ChipForge, Napkin Films, Pixel Vault, Velocidad
The projects
AgentSpek
A practitioner's guide to AI-assisted development, written for engineers who want to actually use agent mode.
It's the book I wish existed when I started directing AI agents through real production work.
Explore AgentSpek →The Decan Log
A book on the 36-decan calendar and a journaling practice rooted in 10-day cycles instead of 7-day weeks.
Built because the weekly grid doesn't match how attention, energy, and reflection actually move.
Explore The Decan Log →The Little Black Book of Hansuru
A pocket field manual on antifragile investing: survive first, then harvest, defend, convex, reload.
Written because the markets punish the wrong relationship with uncertainty faster than anything else does, and the same logic turned out not to be about markets at all.
Explore The Little Black Book of Hansuru →7helm
A live multiplayer game, online co-op for up to four, with the game, its server, the site and the release pipeline in one repository.
A game is a system under load that cannot hide: every loop in it is tested by someone trying to break it, in public.
Explore 7helm →Napkin Films
An agent-directed animated short film studio. Stick figures, ElevenLabs voices, ChipForge music, FFmpeg assembly.
Because animated film is the most compressed form of storytelling I know, and the tools finally let one person make one well.
Explore Napkin Films →ChipForge
A music synthesis engine that generates every sound from pure numpy math, with no samples or audio libraries.
To explore what music can be when composition is pure math, and as a creative counterweight to purely analytical work.
Explore ChipForge →Pixel Vault
A growing museum of single-file HTML5 game prototypes, one mechanic at a time, organized by lineage.
To trace what each fundamental game mechanic actually is, and to record 70 years of design history while making some.
Explore Pixel Vault →Velocidad
A general-purpose learning engine built around the produce-first / drill-friction loop, originally for Spanish.
Because the gap between recognition and production is the bottleneck in any skill, not just language.
Explore Velocidad →Where to begin
A short list that, taken together, is the worldview at its best.
- Making Complexity Visible: the idea under everything here
- AI-Assisted Development Is Not Vibe Coding
- Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan, and the long now
- Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Building a Language Engine You Can Actually Own
- Running a Static Site on AWS: CloudFront, S3 and the edge
- Four Films From Code
- Pixel Vault: A Playable Museum of Game Design History