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Garry Tan breaks an AI-native company into four pieces that are all files, and a fifth one underneath: the brain. I took that breakdown and ran it against a loop I had already built without having seen the talk. Three of the four matched. The fourth and the brain break differently.

What you'll walk away withthe four pieces of his company are files, which is why you can rearrange them; the brain is what makes the rearrangement teach you anything — and the discipline holding both up is to never do one-off work.

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Three agentic projects in parallel, on top of a full project calendar, and a bill of USD 4,207 covering two of them. The money is the least interesting number in it: what August actually cost was deciding the same thing over and over without noticing.

What you'll walk away withhow to notice you are burning hours and money on the wrong thing — three signals that need none of my tools — and what to do in the minute you notice.

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I asked for a parody of a song I like, about my own work. Then I went image by image to check what each one actually referred to — and the checking is the article.

What you'll walk away withthat a prompt and its output prove nothing on their own; what makes the output worth publishing is going image by image and naming what each one refers to.

▶ video in the article

The badge for five years at AWS arrived six months late, and it made me count. This is not about the milestone — it is about the turn underneath it: what I went looking for in 2021, what I found, and why the work taking me further now is not the work I am assigned.

What you'll walk away withwhat repeated all three times the work stopped taking me forward: what I changed was the object of the work, not the company.

What got built, what got cut and why, what it costs a month, and the load-bearing decisions on record as ADRs. The whole setup, not only the conclusion it reached.

The first post. Why this space exists, and what I'm promising you — the honest version of a mid-career transition into AI Engineering.

What you'll walk away withwhat this space is, and the four promises behind it.