Watching AI change everything, in real time, and writing it down.https://herman.engineer/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-field-manual-for-agentic-engineering/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-field-manual-for-agentic-engineering/OpenAI's most productive engineering team has not written a line of code in five months. They have shipped about a million lines. They just published what they learned. Here is the executive translation.Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/karpathy-sequoia-five-notes/https://herman.engineer/blog/karpathy-sequoia-five-notes/Andrej Karpathy spent thirty mostly technical minutes on the Sequoia stage describing the executive shift of the decade. Five things from it survive translation.Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/why-faster-ai-doesnt-make-faster-companies/https://herman.engineer/blog/why-faster-ai-doesnt-make-faster-companies/AI got an order of magnitude faster. Your company got two or three times faster. The gap is not a mystery. It is a measurement problem.Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-great-inversion/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-great-inversion/For 25 years we built interfaces for humans. Now we are building them for agents. The web just flipped.Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/building-for-the-wrong-model/https://herman.engineer/blog/building-for-the-wrong-model/Most enterprise AI investments are compensating for limitations that are about to disappear. When they do, the scaffolding becomes the problem.Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/trust-but-verify/https://herman.engineer/blog/trust-but-verify/AI is confidently wrong some percentage of the time. The skill is not checking every line. It is knowing which lines to check.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/me-palace-memory-claude-code/https://herman.engineer/blog/me-palace-memory-claude-code/Leeloo learned 5,000 years of human history in ten seconds. Your AI can't remember last Tuesday. So Milla Jovovich built an open-source fix.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/say-what-you-mean/https://herman.engineer/blog/say-what-you-mean/Prompting did not die. It fragmented into four different skills. Most of us are still practicing only the first one.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-new-management/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-new-management/AI agents are fast, moderately reliable, and have no sense of direction. The skill they demand most is not technical. It is managerial.Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-taste-gap/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-taste-gap/The most productive users of AI are the ones who are best at rejecting its output.Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/think-in-pieces/https://herman.engineer/blog/think-in-pieces/The skill is not solving the problem. It is slicing it. And it applies to far more than code.Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/what-do-you-actually-want/https://herman.engineer/blog/what-do-you-actually-want/The most expensive sentence in 2026 is not 'build this.' It is 'build... something like this, you know what I mean.'Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/hitchhikers-guide-new-job-market/https://herman.engineer/blog/hitchhikers-guide-new-job-market/AI changed what we can build. It also changed what we need to know. Here are the six skills that matter now.Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/it-is-time-to-boil-the-ocean/https://herman.engineer/blog/it-is-time-to-boil-the-ocean/AI is not competition. It is rocket fuel. The question is what we finally aim at.Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-kitchen-is-open/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-kitchen-is-open/The kitchen just opened. The question is not who gets cut. It is what we finally get to cook.Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/i-know-kung-fu/https://herman.engineer/blog/i-know-kung-fu/Claude Code skills are not plugins. They are not tools. They are knowledge, uploaded at the precise moment it's needed.Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-690b-question/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-690b-question/Wall Street thinks AI infrastructure is overbuilt and AI is powerful enough to destroy $800B in SaaS market cap. Both cannot be true.Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/clawdbought/https://herman.engineer/blog/clawdbought/Two weeks ago, 147,000 stars was a signal. Now the creator of OpenClaw is inside OpenAI. The agent race just got an address.Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/when-intelligence-organizes-itself/https://herman.engineer/blog/when-intelligence-organizes-itself/AI didn't copy our org chart. It reinvented it. Three companies, working independently, arrived at the same management structure.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/147000-github-stars/https://herman.engineer/blog/147000-github-stars/OpenClaw isn't the future. But the demand it exposed is. The market just told you the future is agentic.Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/claude-has-character/https://herman.engineer/blog/claude-has-character/For thirty years we've known that scripts fail under pressure and principles don't. We applied this to people. We forgot to apply it to machines.Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/anthropic-quietly-winning/https://herman.engineer/blog/anthropic-quietly-winning/The company most obsessed with what AI should not do has become the company doing the most interesting things with it.Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/your-ide-is-a-dead-pixel/https://herman.engineer/blog/your-ide-is-a-dead-pixel/The IDE was designed for humans who write code. If agents write the code, the IDE becomes what the light table became to Disney animators.Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-ancient-art-of-knowing-less/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-ancient-art-of-knowing-less/When you create a 'QA engineer' agent, you're not loading specialized capabilities. You're asking a generalist to forget everything except what matters. The sculptor knew this. Now the engineer must learn it.Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-memento-problem/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-memento-problem/Your AI agents wake up every session with no memory of what happened five minutes ago. The fix isn't a bigger brain. It's a better system.Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-bookshelf-in-the-black-hole/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-bookshelf-in-the-black-hole/Why mastery is now the thing that makes you lostWed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/the-genius-who-cant-say-i-dont-know/https://herman.engineer/blog/the-genius-who-cant-say-i-dont-know/Gemini 3 Flash is fast, cheap, and brilliant. It also doesn't know what it doesn't know. First place in knowing. Near last in knowing what it doesn't know.Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/learning-fortran/https://herman.engineer/blog/learning-fortran/What Dorothy Vaughan understood about the future that most people missMon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://herman.engineer/blog/mcp-and-the-token-tax/https://herman.engineer/blog/mcp-and-the-token-tax/Letting your AI agents thinkMon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT