April F.O.C.U.S
April was the month of returning to things: played tourists in our own city, returned to White City Tennis, Stanford LEAD is running at full pace, Hola Maria is moving carefully and on purpose, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, the month managed to feel both full and unhurried.
March F.O.C.U.S
March was the kind of month that asks a lot of you and gives back in small, unexpected ways: a cool breeze, a train ride, a story you couldn't put down. The world was loud. The nights were soft. That, somehow, was enough.
February F.O.C.U.S
February arrived with an accidental jazz theme, a skincare find that earned its place, and a quiet but overdue shift in how I start my mornings. In this month's F.O.C.U.S., a look at what delighted, challenged, and energized me, and how the right environment can call better work out of you
January F.O.C.U.S
This year, I'm starting a new ritual: looking back and preparing ahead through monthly F.O.C.U.S. reflections.
Pipe and Verse, What?
I named this site for the thing that's become impossible to ignore: building products in the age of AI requires being fluent in two languages most people think are opposites.
Pipe is the craft. The system design. The model selection. The prompt/context engineering. The careful consideration of edge cases when you're testing an agent that needs to handle real customer. The discipline of making things that actually function when someone's livelihood depends on them working.
Verse is the human element. The empathy to understand why someone who's done client outreach for fifteen years feels existential dread when you automate it. The wisdom to know that "more efficient" isn't always better if it severs the connection that made the work meaningful. The courage to ask whether we should build something just because we can.
Great products aren't pipe or verse. They're the refusal to choose. And I'm still figuring out how. These are field notes from the attempt.
Welcome to Pipe and Verse.