Why Write

I enjoy writing. Most of my writing here is about software and technology, but lately I’ve been struggling.

I’ve been sculpting so much software with coding agents lately, and most of this is a process of sculpting text documents (like skills) or specs or plans, then showing them to an agent to get an implementation or instill a capability.

What I produce looks very similar to writing. But the process feels very different.

For me, writing is thinking, and a lot of that thinking has been happening in the form of writing prompts, as I steer an agent to build software or capabilities for itself. When you use an agent to build a spec to implement some software, you’re augmenting your thinking with the agent. You describe the seed of the idea and the agent fills in the rest. If you want good results, you read and refine that spec to ensure it meets your vision.

That’s all well and good, but it’s not quite the same as writing, or at least how I see the point of writing.

For me, the point of writing is to think and communicate an idea. Agents allow you to extend that ability to dizzying heights but they don’t replace the process.

The thing that is weird about writing about software now is that it is now nearly the same thing as building the software itself. One is a blog post, the other is a prompt or spec. These days, I take blog posts and pass them into an agent as prompts to play with the ideas myself and see how they work and feel.

I’m deeply grateful to those who publish their work and experimentation for others to learn from. What I am personally struggling with is the point of writing about the software itself.

Take any moderately sized software project or smaller. If you sent an agent to analyze the repo, it could probably write up a spec you could give to another agent that would implement a similar version for you. In that way, software is now kind of like cooking. There are good and bad ingredients for sure, but the steps you follow to get a meal are more or less the same. A good meal is a different story, of course.

I’ve tried reading the spec of a software project created by a coding agent. The vanilla version is usually pretty unpalatable. But agents just do what they’re prompted to do. What if I tried to make the spec more enjoyable to read?

Using the source code and git history of a recent project, I used an agent to generate a narrative about the project and its development. And it was terrible. The agent stated how the system used to work, what was accomplished, and how it works now, but it was nothing you’d want to read. You might read it to understand how to build a similar system, but you wouldn’t read it for enjoyment.

It started with a blog post. January 2nd, 2026—a spec document and a question: what would it take to give an AI agent persistent memory?

The first attempt was overengineered. Temporal workflows, complex state machines, the whole apparatus. By day 5, we’d scrapped it for something simpler…

The early commits tell the story: “Add semantic memory system.” “Rename perch time to drift time.” That second one mattered more than it sounds—naming the autonomous exploration sessions gave them identity…

Then the friction started teaching us…

135 commits later, we have a self-deploying, self-improving architecture. When the agent commits code to its own repository, GitHub Actions builds a new container image, Fly.io deploys it, and the next message runs on the updated code. The agent modifies itself and lives with the consequences.

It’s a bad movie trailer.

I have no doubt some of you have language models writing your newsletters, in your voice, using lots of prior examples of your writing. I’ve done similar exercises like this and I know it can work and it seems to be compelling enough that people read it too. I guess what it comes down to is that I like telling stories about things I’ve tried and what I’ve learned. I’ve been inspired by many others who have done the same and it’s helped bring me to where I am today.

So I am going to do my best to keep writing, despite how rapidly everything is changing - calling out what works for me and what doesn’t. I’ll continue trying to be a realist in the face of all the hype. And I’ll keep doing fun and cool and weird stuff because not everything is about growth and dollars.