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
Subscribe · Tuesday essay
Around 3,800 builders read this weekly.
W16 of 27
TDD for AI Agents, Sketched: The Translation I Want to Commit to Before the Eval Suite Exists
I do not have an eval suite for DOS yet. What I have, twenty-two weeks in, is the smell — every time I change a prompt, I find out whether I broke something the way TDD-less developers found out in 1998: by waiting for the next bug report. I have lived through this pattern three times in the past year. I am writing the design essay for the eval suite before I build it. Kent Beck on TDD's translated primitives for non-deterministic behavior. Michael Feathers on characterization tests for legacy prompts. Both applied to the moment an agent's behavior is supposed to be improving and currently has no measurement at all.
W13 of 27
Failure Patterns, Sketched: The Bookkeeping Discipline I Want for the Agent's Mistakes
I have not built the failure pipeline yet. What I have, nineteen weeks in, is the smell — every Monday I correct the agent on the same kind of mistake I corrected the prior Monday, and the correction has no half-life past the current context window. This is the discipline I want to commit to before the next time I am tired enough to give up on it. Kent Beck on empirical software design and failure as data. Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas on Broken Windows and Boiled Frog. Both applied to an agent that is supposed to be getting better and currently is not.
W10 of 27
Council, Sketched: The Three-Round Debate Protocol I Want to Formalize Before I Build It
I do not have a Council orchestrator. I have something cruder — a habit of channelling two or three named specialists by hand whenever an architectural decision smells like it has more than one defensible answer. Sixteen weeks in, the habit has paid back enough times that I want to commit to its shape before the next time I'm tired and ship the wrong primitive. This is the design essay. Fowler, Kent Beck, and Uncle Bob disagree productively at the bottom — and that disagreement is the part the pattern is supposed to surface.
W04 of 27
The Decomposition Discipline I Am Trying to Codify Inside DOS
Vague requests produce vague work. Two months into building DOS I have started enforcing a discipline I am calling, for now, 'the Algorithm' — every request decomposed into a numbered list of falsifiable criteria before any tool call. This is the design essay for that discipline, written ten weeks in, before the practice is formal enough to call a framework.
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