Entries
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Essays, notes, and research from the studio. Longer pieces remain archived here.
You are sitting on the couch on a Sunday evening, and you are trying to remember what you did on Wednesday. Not the meetings, those are on a calendar, but the actual day, what it felt like, whether anything happened in it that belonged to it and nothing else. The memory does not come. Wednesday has blurred into Tuesday, and Tuesday has blurred into Monday, and the week behind you is one long stretch of hours that went through you without leaving a mark. You did things. You were, in any real sens
What Compression Costs
I killed most of my interests last year. Not in the dramatic way that sounds, not some bonfire of old identities, but in the quiet administrative way that things actually die when you decide to get serious. I stopped designing for fun. Stopped building systems that had no audience. Stopped letting curiosity alone justify a new project. I took everything I'd been doing across half a dozen surfaces and compressed it into one thing, one studio, one domain, one name, and told myself this was the mov
The People I Keep Citing
I have made a self-admitted critical error in this series. I have been citing the same six writers across multiple papers, leaning on their ideas, building arguments on top of their arguments, and I have never properly introduced any of them. I have treated them like old friends at a dinner party who everyone already knows, and that is not fair to anyone reading this for the first time. So this is the correction. These are the six thinkers whose work sits underneath everything I have been writi
Perspective Is the Product
Meaning used to be simple. For most of history, someone handed it to you. A priest, a king, a book, a tradition. You were born into a structure that told you what mattered, what to do with your time, and what your labor was for. The structure could be oppressive, often was, but it answered the question that most people now can't answer at all, which is why any of this matters. Then we got smarter, supposedly. We traded the divine framework for a productive one. Meaning stopped being inherited a
Choosing Felt Like Dying
I spent years telling myself that having a lot of interests was a strength. And it was, in the sense that it gave me range I wouldn't trade. I could design a site and write the copy and think through the funnel and run the ads. I could hold a conversation about philosophy and then go build something technical. The range was real. But what I couldn't do, what I avoided doing for longer than I want to admit, was choose. Because choosing meant killing, and killing meant admitting that some of the t
Evidence of Contact
I started Muay Thai classes a few days ago. I have no idea what I'm doing. The combinations are foreign, my guard drops every time I throw a kick, and by the second round of pad work my lungs were burning so hard I could taste metal in the back of my throat. Actual blood-taste, that copper tang that shows up when your body is working past whatever line it thought it had. My arms were shaking when I unwrapped them afterward. My shins were raw. And standing in the parking lot trying to catch my br
The Competence Floor
What happens when we optimize away the conditions that make tools usable You have just finished something. A report, a proposal, a piece of writing that was due by end of day, and you produced it with the help of a tool that knows how to sound like you, or at least how to sound like someone competent. The document is clean. The structure is logical. The tone is steady and professional. You read it once, adjust a word or two, and send it. And then a strange quiet settles in, not guilt exactly, n
Vibe Coding Field Report
Studio KILN started the way a lot of real projects start, with a clear taste for what the thing should feel like, and almost no certainty about how to make it real. There was no software or web development background at the beginning, and there definitely was not a clean season of “learning first” followed by a clean season of “building later.” Most of what exists now got learned in motion, while shipping AI-enabled software at Rust Automation and Controls, and while trying to build a custom stu
To My Mother
For her birthday
What Building Actually Looks Like
6:10am, the alarm goes off, the house is dark, and my brain is already doing that annoying thing where it tells me that I don’t really have to get up yet. 6:18, I’m standing in the middle of my room, trying to wake up, phone in my hand even though I don’t want it in my hand. 6:20, keys, shoes, jacket, same routine. 7:00 to 3:00, I’m at Rust Automation and Controls, building AI-powered software with a friend, same parking lot, same walk in, same fluorescent lights, the office has that quiet “ever
Life Without Friction
How ease erodes ownership, memory, and gratitude
How I write research papers without getting stuck
(Free guide inside)
Built to Count
Why modern work can't feel good
The Iron Cage
How efficiency became a god
AI won't end creativity
my thoughts on ai after working with it every day
the yakuza's guide to babysitting
the beauty of being the shield
hell’s paradise
what if you’re not too much?
Live like it matters
(A letter to myself)
Try and live slowly
(The modern world demands something different)
Why you need a mission statement
(This will change the course of your life if you apply it appropriately)
A beautiful life is a good life
(Theology of beauty and its importance for living well)
Rethink your training
(Why hybrid training is the BEST training)
Minimize me, oh Lord
(An essay)
Uproot the weeds in your mind
(Why you should strive to get rid of clutter)
The case for getting lost
(How curiosity will fuel a great life)
I won't rot in idleness
(An essay)
Publication
KILN Signal
Issue No. 26 · 2026