Vinny Carpenter

Claude Code shipping a version of the lights widget on the ThinkPad, with the widget's own panel open from the bar. The first Linux I ran came on a stack of floppy disks. It was SLS, early 1990s, and getting the kernel to boot felt like winning something.

Bruce Yandle's 1983 article "Bootleggers and Baptists" has been on my mind all weekend. Yandle was an economist serving as executive director of the Federal Trade Commission, and something puzzled him. A lot of regulation passes that doesn't fix the marke

In August 2025, I wrote From Vibe Mode to Spec Mode: Why I'm All In on Kiro. What appealed to me was the structure: requirements, design, tasks, and standards instead of another conversation I hoped would produce the right software. Kiro's frontier engine

Richard Gabriel wrote "The Rise of Worse Is Better" to make his own side look bad. He caricatured the Unix and C school of design, called it the New Jersey approach, and admitted in the same paper that it would win. I reread it because agents have changed

This essay is part of an ongoing series on how enterprise software delivery changes when agents become participants in the engineering system. The series starts with Your Platform Has a New User: The Agent. Consider a developer using an agent to create a

When I returned to blogging in May 2025, I was making room for thoughts I'd mostly kept to myself for 20 years. The early posts were experiments and observations: side projects, new tools, the pleasure of learning something unfamiliar. Over the following

This essay is part of an ongoing series on how enterprise software delivery changes when agents become participants in the engineering system. The series starts with Your Platform Has a New User: The Agent. "Welcome to PlatformGPT. What can I help you wit

In June 2002, Joel Spolsky published a short piece of microeconomics that explains a surprising amount of this month's AI news. Strategy Letter V is about complements: products people usually buy or use together. Gas and cars. Flights to Miami and hotel r

This essay is part of an ongoing series on how enterprise software delivery changes when agents become participants in the engineering system. The series starts with Your Platform Has a New User: The Agent. A page still ends at a person's phone. At 3 a.m.

The fans spun up one morning and never wound down. I had a couple of Claude Code sessions deep in different repos, a local model resident under Ollama so an agent could review diffs without leaving the machine, a llama.cpp experiment I had forgotten about