27 weeks · 54 posts · Written while building
Field notes from a personal AI OS in flight
Every Tuesday, an evergreen essay on what I'm learning while shipping DuranteOS. Every Friday, a dispatch from the week. Roughly 108,000 words and counting — for builders who'd rather watch the foundation get poured than read the press release.
Start here
If you're thinking about writing while building
After Twenty-Seven Weeks: What the Series Was For, and What I'm Building Next
If you're considering the founding cohort
The One Reference Customer Strategy: GTM for a Personal AI OS, Sketched Before the Customer Signs
If you want the architectural spine
The Decomposition Discipline I Am Trying to Codify Inside DOS
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Around 3,800 builders read this weekly.
W27 of 27
After Twenty-Seven Weeks: What the Series Was For, and What I'm Building Next
The series ends here. Twenty-seven weeks of evergreens, twenty-seven Friday dispatches, six months of writing while building. The last thirty-three weeks produced about three hundred and five commits, a Studio platform that has been live for one hundred and three days, a knowledge graph the writing forced me to articulate, and a list — drawn from the posts themselves — of what I am committing to build in the next quarter. This essay closes the arc and names the next one.
W20 of 27
Six Months of DOS: What Changed, What Endured, What Surprised
Twenty-six weeks of building a personal AI operating system in public. Twenty essays in this series so far. Roughly twelve packs in various states of readiness. Around eighty workflows. About 3,800 newsletter subscribers. Zero paying customers, with four months left on the founding-customer clock. Here is the honest half-year retrospective — what survived contact with reality through Q1, what I was wrong about, what I never saw coming.
W19 of 27
The Knowledge Portfolio for an Indie Founder Building in Public, Audited at Week 25
Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas argued in The Pragmatic Programmer that engineers should manage their learning the way an investor manages a portfolio — diversify, invest regularly, review periodically, accept calculated risk. Twenty-six years later, applied honestly twenty-five weeks into building a personal AI OS, here is what my actual portfolio looks like, where the binding constraint is, and what I am rebalancing this quarter.
W14 of 27
The One Reference Customer Strategy: GTM for a Personal AI OS, Sketched Before the Customer Signs
Studio shipped eighteen days ago. The reference customer has not signed. Most go-to-market plans optimize for ten paying customers in the first quarter — mine optimizes for one, by July, with a year-long deep collaboration that produces the patterns, the case study, and the next ten customers as a side effect. This is the strategy I am committing to in public before I have the customer, because writing it down sharpens the hunt.
W12 of 27
Builder's Compass: Two Years In, ~3,800 Subscribers, and What I've Learned Teaching Architecture
I started Builder's Compass in late 2023 because I was tired of giving the same architectural advice in five different DMs every week. The list is now ~3,800 deeply-engaged software architects, founders, and senior engineers, the cadence has held for the better part of two years and a quarter, and the slow growth has taught me more than the spikes did. Here is what worked, what did not, and the one piece of advice I keep giving away to founders asking whether to write publicly.
W03 of 27
Why I Just Left a Steady Practice to Build a Personal AI Operating System
Twenty years as a software architect. A teaching post on an MBA program. A consulting practice I spent five years building. I am closing all three to spend my full attention on a private experiment that does not yet have a paying customer. This is the decision essay, written from inside the decision — the trade-off, the fear, and the thesis.
The 27-week arc · A single body of work
Twenty-seven weeks. Two posts a week. Six months of writing while building.
Week
Tuesday evergreen
Friday dispatch
2025-10-28
The Agent Is the Product: Why Intelligence Replaces Interface
2025-10-31
Wrapper Wars: The Week Cursor, Windsurf, and MiniMax All Went Vertical
2025-11-04
Memory Replaces Lock-In: Designing the Substrate of Personal AI
2025-11-07
The Week the Substrate Caught Up: Kimi K2 Thinking Lands
2025-11-11
Why I Just Left a Steady Practice to Build a Personal AI Operating System
2025-11-14
The Week the Harness Ate the Model
2025-11-18
The Decomposition Discipline I Am Trying to Codify Inside DOS
2025-11-21
Antigravity, Gemini 3, Grok 4.1: The Week the Frontier Re-Rendered
2025-11-25
Four Copies, One Source of Truth: The Sync Pattern I Want to Commit to Before It Hurts
2025-11-28
Opus 4.5 Lands on Thanksgiving Week: Anthropic's Quiet Counter-Punch
2025-12-02
Plugin Architecture for Hooks: The Pattern I Want Before the Hook Becomes a God-Function
2025-12-05
The Runtime Is the Moat Now: Anthropic Buys Bun, Claude Code Hits a Billion
2025-12-09
Credit-Metered API Gateways: The Pattern I Want Before I Have Anything to Meter
2025-12-12
Three Frontier Models in 23 Days: Stop Picking a Winner, Start Picking a Router
2025-12-16
Sentinel, Sketched: Convention-Driven Onboarding Before I Build It
2025-12-19
The Spec Goes Public, the Substrate Goes to War: Skills Opens While Codex, Gemini Flash, and Nemotron Sprint
2025-12-23
Memory, Sketched: The Knowledge Graph I Was Designing Before MemPalace Shipped
2025-12-26
Christmas Wasn't Quiet: Open Weights Caught Up, Nvidia Bought Inference, Frontier Labs Bought Loyalty
2025-12-30
Council, Sketched: The Three-Round Debate Protocol I Want to Formalize Before I Build It
2026-01-02
The Practitioners' Year-End: While the West Took PTO, DeepSeek Shipped Architecture
2026-01-06
Altyaa's Wedge: The Brazilian-Portuguese SMB Bet Studio Is Pointed At
2026-01-09
Default Claude: Microsoft Flips the Switch as the Substrate Distributes by Default
2026-01-13
Builder's Compass: Two Years In, ~3,800 Subscribers, and What I've Learned Teaching Architecture
2026-01-16
The Agent Surface Splits in Two: Anthropic Goes Vertical While China Goes Substrate
2026-01-20
Failure Patterns, Sketched: The Bookkeeping Discipline I Want for the Agent's Mistakes
2026-01-23
The Rules Layer Solidifies: Constitution, Hardware, and Export Controls Land in One Week
2026-01-27
The One Reference Customer Strategy: GTM for a Personal AI OS, Sketched Before the Customer Signs
2026-01-30
Vertical Integration Eats Horizontal AI: Maia, Meta's Capex, and Anthropic-ServiceNow
2026-02-03
Hexagonal in Practice: The Ports and Adapters I'm Pulling Studio Toward
2026-02-06
Coding Becomes the Flagship: Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex Land the Same Day
2026-02-10
TDD for AI Agents, Sketched: The Translation I Want to Commit to Before the Eval Suite Exists
2026-02-13
The Bifurcation Hardens: Anthropic's $380B Meets China's Open-Weights Frontier
2026-02-17
Refactoring the Hook Pipeline: The Fowler Walkthrough I'm Three Refactorings Into
2026-02-20
The Sonnet Window: Free-Tier Skills, Code Security, and the Race for Agentic Primitives
2026-02-24
Skills, Packs, and Hooks: The Three-Layer Model I'm Pulling DOS Toward
2026-02-27
The Moat Above the Model: Distillation, Mobile Coding, and MCP Battlegrounds
2026-03-03
The Knowledge Portfolio for an Indie Founder Building in Public, Audited at Week 25
2026-03-06
Procurement Is the New Benchmark: OpenAI Wins the DoW While Anthropic Gets Banned
2026-03-10
Six Months of DOS: What Changed, What Endured, What Surprised
2026-03-13
The Counter-Sovereignty Move: Anthropic Sues, Then Diversifies
2026-03-17
MCP in Production: What Works When the Protocol Becomes the Boundary
2026-03-20
Cursor Becomes a Model Lab: Composer 2 and the Unbundling at the Agent Layer
2026-03-24
Routing by Sovereignty Class: The Architecture That Survives the Procurement Decade
2026-03-27
The Injunction the Pentagon Won't Honor: Anthropic Wins, the State Defies
2026-03-31
Sentinel's First Scan: What the Convention Catalog Found Across Eleven Projects
2026-04-03
The Agent Stack Swallows the IDE, the IPO, and the Courtroom
2026-04-07
Forking MemPalace: The 48-Hour Integration Retro
2026-04-10
Project Glasswing: When the Frontier Bifurcates on Safety
2026-04-14
The 90-Day Open-Weights Bakeoff: What Actually Routes Where in DOS Today
2026-04-17
Routines Eat the Workflow: The Harness Becomes the Product