Hello World!
Originally written in 2022 and revised in 2026. The assumptions have been updated. The curiosity hasn't.
Every technology choice, every framework, every diagram is a compressed representation of reality — architects build abstractions that other people have to live inside.
Architecture externalizes assumptions. The job is deciding which assumptions to externalize, and whether they're still true.
This blog lives in that question.
I've been inspired for years by thinkers who write in public — Jeff Atwood, Martin Fowler, Joel Spolsky, Scott Hanselman — people who treat blogging as thinking out loud, not performing expertise. I want to do that here.
The themes I keep returning to:
- Clarity of thought — what it actually takes to think well, and how rarely precision and clarity are the same thing
- The complexity of abstraction — why the models we build to simplify reality so often end up constraining it
- The future of AI — not the hype, but the architectural implications of systems that reason rather than execute
I don't have a stack. I have a principle: the right tool for the right abstraction, wherever that leads. My programming journey started on an IBM XT in BASIC — a machine that did exactly what you told it, nothing more. These days I'm deep in agentic AI systems, MCP architecture, and the genuinely strange question of what software even is when reasoning replaces specification.
The machines are getting a lot less obedient. I find that fascinating.
This is thinking in public. Expect revisions.
— Karl