writing
Phoenix's notes and essays share one reverse-chronological index: engineering discipline, agentic systems, philosophy, and the quieter machinery of attention.
From Vibe to Engineering
At Sequoia AI Ascent 2026, Karpathy said he had "never felt more behind." Reading the transcript, I realized he was not drawing a prediction line. He was drawing a professional fault line.
Near Misses
"Fail fast" is the chant, but the data says people who failed before are not necessarily better next time - and what success hides may be more dangerous than what failure hides. Reading Ozan Varol.
Cybernetics and Life
A feedback loop is not merely an engineering concept. Used as a life operating system, it reveals how often we are living inside bad open-loop assumptions.
Rocket Engineers Do Not Wait for Inspiration
They say, "today we inspect the O-ring." Bring that discipline into creative work and it will quarrel with the cult of inspiration - and it will win.
The Parallelism Illusion of One-Person Projects
Three projects in motion looks productive. In practice it is context reload after context reload - slower than finishing one thing with the mind still warm.