ikkachar.dev

Writing

Field notes on building AI-native products, context engineering, and the craft of shipping.

16 min read

Loop engineering is verifier engineering

Eleven articles, 43 million views, one idea: design loops that prompt your agents. They all agree you need a verifier. Almost none of them are one.

aiagentsarchitecture
10 min read

Prompt engineering is over. You're a context engineer now.

Prompt engineering quietly gave way to context engineering. The catch: most teams doing it are doing it backwards.

aicontext-engineeringagents
4 min read

The AI coworker is a weekend project now

Viktor and Martoshi make the AI-employee-in-Slack look like a company. We built the same shape on Vercel's Eve in one session.

buildingagentsarchitecture
3 min read

Your product is the easy part now

AI collapsed the cost of building software. The bottleneck moved from creation to adoption, and most founders are still optimizing the solved side.

aibuildingproduct
3 min read

The chat UX is the product, not the model

shadcn calls it scroll engineering. It is bigger than that. Users don't churn on your model, they churn on the chat UX around it.

buildingproductdesign
4 min read

Stop picking npm or shadcn for your users

npm versus shadcn is the wrong fight. How much of your component a team wants to own is their call, not yours. Ship the whole spectrum from one source.

buildingarchitectureproduct
3 min read

We deleted Jira in three weeks

Building your own Jira used to be insane. With AI writing the code and an MCP server wiring it to everything, the math flipped.

buildingagentscto
3 min read

Your homepage should run the product

I rebuilt the Prompt Area homepage around the live component instead of copy about it. For a developer tool, the demo is not a section on the page. It is the page.

buildingproductdesign
3 min read

Build for the model you'll lose

The best coding model in the world lasted three days before a government directive switched it off. The lesson is not 'use local models.' It is 'never couple your product to a model you are not allowed to keep.'

aiarchitecturebuilding
2 min read

Agent memory is mostly hoarding

Stuffing every past message into context is not memory, it is hoarding. Real memory is knowing what to forget.

aiagentscontext-engineering
2 min read

Context is the new CMS

For twenty years teams ran a content management system. The next era runs on context management: what your AI knows before it writes a word.

aicontext-engineeringbuilding
2 min read

Your evals are the moat

Your prompts are not your moat. Your model is not your moat. The test suite that catches silent regressions is the thing nobody can copy.

aievalsbuilding
2 min read

A bigger model won't save you

Most 'we need a bigger model' complaints are context engineering problems in disguise. A smaller model with the right context beats a frontier model fed a junk drawer.

aicontext-engineeringbuilding
2 min read

Spend your three innovation tokens on the product

Choosing Postgres and a boring monolith looks lazy. It is the opposite. Here is how I think about innovation budget as a CTO.

ctoarchitecturebuilding