Blogs

The move from compilers to AI coding brings with it two main problems: non-determinism, and the loss of our mental models of software. The first problem means that prompt outputs aren’t stable, and in long-term agentic work the compounding instability leads to chaotic systems with highly divergent outcomes. As agent errors are often not mechanistically detectable, the system needs to act as a feedback loop with the agent being the detector and corrector, aided by mechanistic detection and correction, like compilers and tests, where possible....

I believe software development, and the resulting products, would greatly improve if we thought of “tech debt” and “refactors” as V1/V2/etc. Feature releases should occasionally happen alongside a code evolution (aka refactor). This evolution shouldn’t be thought of as low value nor as a nice to have; it is the core of what we do in software and tech! This may sound weird, but a great parallel to this is what SpaceX does....

the great mathematician, Paul Erdős, used to talk of The Book, the one where God put all of the most elegant proofs of Mathematics. sometimes he would see a proof but say that we must find the proof from The Book, because while the given proof was correct, it was clear that something greater existed. A perspective of this level is one I have never seen in programming, but it’s definitely something I started feeling recently....

While working on my startup, Overlord Systems, I was confused for a while by why I couldn’t seem to reduce the amount of work required for the product to be ready for a limited beta release. After all, we in the web dev world are used to launching MVPs lightning fast. This article is me understanding why via a mental framework I call “composite” and “monolithic” products, which I expect will be useful to both founders and investors....

Alternative title: On Console Windows, GUI Processes, and Pipe Inheritance in Windows While working on Overlord Systems I wanted to do something simple: run the Overlord Engine (a native Windows app) and any child processes it creates without any console window showing to the user. It is simple, kind of. I just haven’t seen the entire behavior and background knowledge in one place, so this is a short write-up in case it helps someone....

This article aims to express the mental model that I have built over the last few years for thinking about human-computer interfaces, software, and how we might produce a step-function increase in building and using software. A new way to program, if you will. Note that this is more of a mental-model/philosophy than a falsifiable scientific theory, and not fundamentally novel. For many years I have been searching for an idea to work on within software that is deep, impactful, personally fulfilling, and one that enables a massive business to be built on top of it....

Note: This is not a random rant against AI, after all I am a Founder of an AI startup, Overlord Systems. Much has been written recently about how software no longer has a moat because AI gives you both engineering ability and a high speed of producing software, therefore making any piece of software copyable in a short time, and thus software is no longer a moat. Only, this is isn’t true in the way it’s being advertised....

In ‘Thought 2: Regex is Like Assembly’ I wondered why we are still doing regex in this kind of hard to understand, symbolic way, when we have already invented high level programming languages. There is no reason regex can’t be written as clearly as any other programming language we use today. I thought doing this would be an interesting project, and so I came up with Regexl, a high level language for writing regex, that can be used as a simple library....

In Part 3 we setup the basis of our simple path/waypoint system, however we still can’t use it easily because the gizmos we used are just simple graphics, so in this post we will create interactive tools in the scene view that we can use to control objects, which we will do using Handles. According to the Unity Docs: “Handles are the 3D controls that Unity uses to manipulate items in the scene view....

After talking about inspector attributes in part 2, it is time to switch our focus to the scene view. Most of editor scripting in Unity is changing and dealing with the editor by adding buttons, making UI changes or creating new windows, however, there is a small part of the editor API that allows you to work with the scene view, and those are Gizmos. Gizmos are all these little UI elements and graphics present all over the scene view, all the different icons on objects, like the sun and camera icons, the outline around selected objects and the collider outline are all in reality gizmos....