Before the Name
7 passages from 4 posts
The most interesting things to build are the ones where the category doesn't exist yet. The conviction comes before the consensus — you feel certain about something the world hasn't agreed is real. This is a recurring pattern: mobile live wallpapers, social gaming with video chat, in-person connection as a product. Each was built before anyone had agreed on what to call it. Being early isn't always right, but the ideas worth caring about usually arrive before the vocabulary does.
"Editing in place was tempting because it kept the workspace tidy. But it threw away the most valuable artifact: the trail of decisions. Six months from now, when someone asks "why does the auth code look like this when the original spec said JWT?" — the answer is in 01-spec-r1.md, frozen at the moment of the call, with 01-spec-r2.md capturing exactly when and why we turned. That history is worth more than the cleanliness."
"You invoke it with a thesis: /flow-spike "session storage in localStorage is faster than IndexedDB for entries under 100KB". Spike turns that into a branch, scaffolds a workstream, plans the validation, builds it, reviews it, and opens a draft PR with a structured human-review package. You walk away. You come back to something testable."
"It started as a single HTML file. It's still a single HTML file at its core, conceptually — even though it's now a Next.js app with a Supabase backend, an MCP server, and a PWA manifest. The soul of it hasn't changed: a distraction-free space to write 750 words every day, with the cursor locked to the center of the screen like a typewriter."
"The product decisions were easy because I was the only user I had to satisfy. I didn't need to run user research or A/B test the progress bar. I just built what felt right, used it every day, and iterated based on whether it was working for me."
"Mozi is his bet on a different approach: strip out the media, keep the social."
"What passes the test tends to be coordination infrastructure — tools that make it easier to go from "we should hang out" to actually hanging out. That's a narrower product surface area, but it's the right one."
"Bunch was a social gaming platform for mobile — think Discord meets FaceTime, but built for the games already on your phone. Mobile gaming was inherently solitary, even when you were playing against your friends. We wanted to change that: open Bunch, start a video call, and play any game already on your phone — together, without any complicated setup."