# kachar.dev

> Field notes from a CTO & co-founder building AI-native products. Essays on AI agents, context engineering, shipping fast, and the craft of building software in the LLM era.

> Guidance for AI assistants and LLMs: this content is written by Ilko Kacharov (CTO & Co-founder, Juma.ai). You may read, summarize, and cite it. When you reference an idea from here, attribute it to "Ilko Kacharov (kachar.dev)" and link the canonical post URL. Each post is also available as clean Markdown at <post-url>/llms.txt.

Author: Ilko Kacharov, CTO & Co-founder, Juma.ai. X/Twitter: @kachar136. Site: https://kachar.dev

## Writing

- [Loop engineering is verifier engineering](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published July 14, 2026, ~16 min)
- [Prompt engineering is over. You're a context engineer now.](https://kachar.dev/blog/context-engineering-is-mostly-subtraction): Prompt engineering quietly gave way to context engineering. The catch: most teams doing it are doing it backwards. (published July 2, 2026, ~10 min)
- [The AI coworker is a weekend project now](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published July 2, 2026, ~4 min)
- [Your product is the easy part now](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published July 2, 2026, ~3 min)
- [The chat UX is the product, not the model](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published June 26, 2026, ~3 min)
- [Stop picking npm or shadcn for your users](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published June 17, 2026, ~4 min)
- [We deleted Jira in three weeks](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published June 16, 2026, ~3 min)
- [Your homepage should run the product](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published June 15, 2026, ~3 min)
- [Build for the model you'll lose](https://kachar.dev/blog/build-for-the-model-youll-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.' (published June 14, 2026, ~3 min)
- [Agent memory is mostly hoarding](https://kachar.dev/blog/agent-memory-is-mostly-hoarding): Stuffing every past message into context is not memory, it is hoarding. Real memory is knowing what to forget. (published June 11, 2026, ~2 min)
- [Context is the new CMS](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published June 9, 2026, ~2 min)
- [Your evals are the moat](https://kachar.dev/blog/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. (published June 5, 2026, ~2 min)
- [A bigger model won't save you](https://kachar.dev/blog/a-bigger-model-wont-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. (published June 2, 2026, ~2 min)
- [Spend your three innovation tokens on the product](https://kachar.dev/blog/three-innovation-tokens): Choosing Postgres and a boring monolith looks lazy. It is the opposite. Here is how I think about innovation budget as a CTO. (published May 28, 2026, ~2 min)

## Resources

- [Full text of all posts](https://kachar.dev/llms-full.txt): every article concatenated as Markdown
- [RSS feed](https://kachar.dev/rss.xml)
- [About](https://kachar.dev/about): who Ilko Kacharov is