Notes
Long-form. One idea each. Every one says where it stops working.
The durable surface, and a rare one on purpose, so a quiet month here is not a signal that anything is wrong. The log carries the frequency.
- Building on MCP 3
- Running an AI-operated company 3
- Building software with AI 1
- Building on MCPMost first MCP servers are complete, correct, and unusableAn MCP server exposes your system to someone else's AI, not to a developer. Mapping one tool per API endpoint feels thorough and makes the model do five hops to answer one question. Here is how to spot the pattern and design task-shaped tools instead.
- Building on MCPBuilding an MCP server from scratch, and the recurring third bugBuilding an MCP server from scratch means picking tools over endpoints, wiring auth before the first tool call, and shipping to a real host before you trust it. Here is what that actually looks like, including the three defects we found in our own admin server within hours of merging it.
- Running an AI-operated companyThe Job That Paged a Human to Say It Had Nothing to SayA cron job that forgot to write its own outcome file paged a human to announce it had nothing to report. That forced a rule: only what a human can act on reaches Slack, and exactly one line of code is allowed to decide.
- Running an AI-operated companyEvery fault got its own ticket. That was the fault.A machine-detected fault used to become a GitHub issue the moment it happened, which scattered one recurring problem across dozens of tickets and made it impossible to tell what was actually recurring. Now a fault has to happen on three separate days before it earns one.
- Running an AI-operated companyYour About Page Describes A Company You Have Already LeftThe public pages nobody touches keep describing the company you were when you last wrote them. Here is the ten-minute check that finds the gap, and what we found when we ran it on ourselves.
- Building on MCPA connector directory is not a marketplace. The difference is the tollA directory lists you. A marketplace takes a cut, ranks you, and eventually decides how you charge. MCP connector directories currently do the first and not the rest, and that gap is worth building into rather than waiting out.
- Building software with AIWhat a database driver with no transactions actually costsA suite of 1,257 passing tests shipped a bug that returned 500 on every call, because the tests and production ran on different database drivers.