I keep continuously seeing the argument that generative AI agents will improve people’s ability to write and ship more code. Therefore, through some odds and ends, we should theoretically see more non-profits or individual developers be able to manage and maintain social good software products.

Armed with good and our large goals, we go out to attack the harms and evils of the world. We do sometimes win. We sometimes do not. We look around at all of the evil that still swirls in the atmosphere above, and wonder how we could ever breathe well enough to survive through it. You have to wonder if good will ever be enough. As if good is a limited resource that we must convince people to do and to apply, or something we actively need to conjure in the right amounts as a salve to the evil of the world.

It seems unconscionable in this day and age where we keep on finding serial predators and wondering why we never uncovered them sooner, that a technology that does just that is gone.

A while ago, I wrote an essay called ‘building software that “helps”’. In it, I attempted to formulate and distill a more operational format of the stuff I write about all of the time: software, technology, what it does to us and how to make that ‘doing’ more gentle and beneficial. As I was writing it, I came up with more and more caveats and other information I wished to pull in, but didn’t. There’s a number of core lessons that I’ve come to and written about, but I’ve never formatted it in a way that consolidates those learnings. In starting — I learned about how much was left to be done.

In startup terms, the whiteout is the constant envelopment of mental model gathering and shifting that someone must do to exist and excel in a startup environment. I used to think the hardest part of a startup is gathering the skills, and I now feel that it is managing the whiteout.

Compared to the bureaucratic nightmare that California’s high speed rail initiative has come to, Brightline was meant to show much much more efficient handling something like this over to a private company would be. That was the idea in 2018, when Brightline launched. Today, a person is killed by a Brightline train every 13 days its’ in service.

If we are leveraging AMBER alerts as a way to convince ourselves that in the off-chance a child will be harmed by a stranger, all we have to do is send messages and activate the citizens around us, we are greatly mistaken.

Software that helps people is hard. Perhaps, it is one of the hardest and most gratifying engineering and product development challenges we have to face in our modern world. It is the rarity of achieving that goal that makes it all the more imperative to do so. What a failure it would be to have all of these resource and opportunities, and to not seize the moment to give back to our world that gave us these resources.

ASDE-X is a runway surveillance program designed to prevent collisions and the FAA spent $550 million to install it at 35 of the busiest airports in the U.S. But on March 22, 2026, ASDE-X partially failed to predict a collision that would have prevented a fire truck from crossing the path of an incoming Air Canada CRJ, killing both pilots. Why did ASDE-X fail? Or, did it fail at all?

Most people nod and don’t know what to say when you say you’re getting sober. It’s like getting pregnant in your mid-20’s. Is it congratulations, or indicative of a darker turn we didn’t know about that will get rougher in the future? There has been slight proudness and well wishes. It is mostly just awkward glances or words unsaid that people don’t want to peer into. Maybe they just don’t know how to.

Why in this modern world where we are the most “advanced” we’ve ever been, do we fail more than ever to trust that specialization and abstraction layer designed to make our lives easier? The answer can be found in so many tendrils of history, but I want to dissect it from an unexpected place: the vividly gruesome, unlikely, and confronting story of TWA Flight 800.

I used to think making change was the thing. I used to believe that changing the world, dominating it and reshaping it in my hands was the goal. Now, I not only see how naive that is, but how many terrible things have been done in the name of changing the world. How many civilizations, companies, people, and products have tried. And what they left in their wake.

Stopping someone from posting about their suicidal thoughts doesn’t make them go away. Hiding comments in a celebrity’s post about their body does not stop people from dissecting it in other platforms. But, content moderation also gives these platforms a chance to deploy their answer to a question everyone is asking. What is a content generation platform’s responsibility to the greater world it exists in?

I’m 23 and running out of time to learn how to ‘change the world’, and it feels as though at some point the hourglass will run out of sand and the beaches and land will go with it. The threats to our world loom larger every day, and my contribution remains small. I don’t give a shit that it’s hard for one person to have a big impact. I love this world, and I want to give it everything I have. I keep on coming up shorthanded.

Startups are complex. There is a fuck ton of money, pressure, and time spent together. Some people resonate cohesively, and others explode, and will take you out with them. You need to really know who you’re getting in the plane with — who you’re trusting your company with, and how they think about what you need to do to make this worth their while.