23rd February 2021
When building a tool, it’s easy to forget how much you’ve internalized: how much knowledge and context you’ve assumed. Your tool can feel familiar or even obvious to you while being utterly foreign to everyone else. If your goal is for other people to use the darn thing — meaning you’re not just building for yourself, or tinkering for its own sake (which are totally valid reasons) — you gotta help people use it! It doesn’t matter what’s possible or what you intended; all that matters is whether people actually succeed in practice.
Recent articles
- Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty - 19th March 2026
- GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52 - 17th March 2026
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026