My Coding Agent Shouldn't Have a Boss
Claude Code is one of the best products I use. That is exactly why realizing how little of it I controlled became uncomfortable.
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Candid accounts of building, closing and rebuilding companies. Decisions, mistakes and changing beliefs, alongside essays on ownership and technological change.
George Pu
Founder of SimpleDirect, an independent Canadian AI lab.
The parts of AI I could no longer delegate
I started an AI lab before I was capable of supervising model training myself. Then a bigger training run didn't work, and the gap stopped being ignorable.
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I am not afraid of failure. I am afraid of becoming irrelevant.
Failure feels survivable. The harder fear is spending an important period in history building something that doesn't matter - and not knowing whether that fear comes from purpose or ego.
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I have stopped knowing what a productive day feels like
AI made our small team faster than any team I've run before. It also destroyed the old relationship between effort, output, and satisfaction.
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The company is moving faster than I am
Vinci didn't exist 30 days ago. The company has already changed shape several times. I'm not sure I've processed any of it.
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30 Days, Six Products, Two Dead Models, and the Part That Didn't Work
On July 9 we shipped a model my engineering lead trained. On July 12 I took it off the product. Six products in 30 days is the headline. That decision is the story.
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What a 3-Person Team Actually Pays for AI: July 2026
In the first week of July I spent over $5,000 coding through one company's API and couldn't tell you what I got for it. Here's what we actually pay now - the receipts, the line that shouldn't have existed, and the one number I'm holding back.
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The Day I killed our product strategy
Today (on a Sunday) I took our own AI models off our own app and replaced them with a competitor's model. This is the story of how the decision happened in 24 hours, what it was like in the 4 days leading up to it, what it cost me to see it, and what I think other founders can take from it. Day 1 - my own product told me the truth We're an AI model company. Or we were. We spent months training small open-weight models for honesty - models that say 'I don't know' instead of inventing answers
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Six Months After My Post-AI Manifesto - A Reflection
Six months ago I posted the Post-AI Manifesto - five layers to stay ahead of AI. Here's what happened to each one, and the single line that captures the whole difference.
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Why We Shipped Vinci on the Eve of Canada Day
Nobody takes Canada seriously on AI - and for years we earned it. The compute wall, why it finally fell, and why we shipped Vinci Piccolo on the eve of Canada Day.
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I Got Bored of Being a Commentator
I got good at having AI takes - and one day realized I'd become a commentator, not a builder. A complaint is just a wish with better production values. So I built the replacement.
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Why We Started With Character
Capability is getting cheaper every month. What's scarce is a model you actually want to talk to. Why we bet on character - and started with a small, open, honest 4B model you can run yourself.
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