Rosano / Journal

2 entries for Sunday, January 4, 2026

How do we build the future with AI?

[The bigness and slowness of government] is supposed to create space and resources to account for the communities that a “lean” approach deliberately ignores.

building for yourself on a saturated platform doesn’t shift paradigms if you are already the main character

it’s not like masses of sheeple relish in the experience of catching a cab and couldn’t describe a theoretical better option if they tried. It’s that realizing such a thing requires availability of copious investment capital in the face of non-negligible risk. People who can pursue this kind of thing are either previous-tech-exit-rich or poised-to-convince-venture-capitalists-rich. Their stories are fun to tell and hear, but not practical mogul origin stories for the vast majority of tech workers.

In the nineties, the Dorm Room Garage Dudes had an appreciable head start on relationships and resources to build the commercial web. But by the time the mobile platform came along, those same people had become billionaire tech moguls with cliques that garnered names like ‘The Paypal Mafia.’ This gave them an order of magnitude more opportunity to move first on mobile. Over time, that lead has continued to grow, and with it the time from market creation to market saturation has shortened.

Immutable Infrastructure, Immutable Code

A system becomes legacy when understanding it requires historical knowledge that isn't encoded anywhere except the code itself.

The tragedy is that teams recreate this failure mode faster with AI, because mutation feels cheap while understanding quietly becomes expensive. You can generate a thousand lines in seconds. But the moment you start editing those lines, you've created an artifact that can only be understood historically. You've created brittle legacy code in an afternoon.

If knowledge only exists in the implementation, it's not knowledge. It's risk. Regeneration forces you to make the implicit explicit, or accept that it wasn't essential.

Burn it. Regenerate it. Trust what survives the fire.