Latest posts
- Members Only: Your anonymity set has collapsed and you don't know it yetFeb 26, 2026JA Westenberg
- Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)Feb 25, 2026JA Westenberg
February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling
- Agentic swarms are an org-chart delusionFeb 24, 2026JA Westenberg
The "agentic swarm" vision of productivity is comfortingly familiar. Which should be an immediate red flag... You take the existing corporate hierarchy, you replace the bottom layers with a swarm of AI agents, and you keep humans around as supervisors. It's an org chart with robots
- Thoughts on FarcasterFeb 23, 2026JA Westenberg
For the past few weeks I've been asking myself why I'm still on Farcaster, whether I'll stay, whether I even want to. I've landed on some answers. Farcaster, for the uninitiated, was the most credible attempt anyone has made at building a
- Everyone in AI is building the wrong thing for the same reasonFeb 23, 2026JA Westenberg
Every AI founder I talk to is on an accelerating treadmill, burdened by a nagging suspicion that the entire industry is moving too fast in a direction that doesn't quite make sense, with no idea about how to get off. There is an overwhelming feeling that if everyone
- The unbearable weight of cruftFeb 20, 2026JA Westenberg
- The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured outFeb 18, 2026JA Westenberg
Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow
- The empire always fallsFeb 15, 2026JA Westenberg
A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia: all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity // the
- AI twitter's favourite lie: everyone wants to be a developerFeb 14, 2026JA Westenberg
Twitter's latest consensus on inevitability: now that large language models can write code, everyone will become a software developer. People, you see, have problems, and software solves problems, and AI removes the barrier between people and software, therefore everyone will build their own software. It's a
- Members only: "Won't Fix" self helpFeb 13, 2026JA Westenberg
Every major self-help framework of the last two decades falls into one of two camps. Camp one is Stoic Acceptance: your problems are features, not bugs, and the path to contentment runs through radical non-resistance. Camp two is Relentless Optimization: your problems are solvable if you wake up at 4:
- Communities are not fungibleFeb 11, 2026JA Westenberg
There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "lose" one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and
- The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.Feb 09, 2026JA Westenberg
Every week, thousands of founders open Canva or Google Slides or, God help them, PowerPoint, and begin the ritual. They agonize over fonts, nudge logos three pixels to the left and workshop whether the TAM slide should come before or after the team slide, as though the ordering of these
- How to stop being boringFeb 05, 2026JA Westenberg
The most interesting people I know aren't trying to be interesting. Thank God. They're saying what they actually think and wearing what they actually like, pursuing hobbies that genuinely fascinate them, regardless of whether those hobbies are cool. The most mind-numbingly boring people I know are
- The Coherence PremiumFeb 02, 2026JA Westenberg
I don't necessarily believe in second brains. The notion (pun-intended) that you can offload your thinking to a perfectly organized system of notes and links has always struck me as a fantasy. The people I know who've built elaborate Notion databases or Obsidian vaults mostly end
- Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 MondaysJan 31, 2026JA Westenberg
We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer. The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment where everything crystallizes into meaning. We accumulate these peaks in our imagination, and then arrange them into a montage that