https://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. en Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai agents architecture https://kachar.dev/blog/context-engineering-is-mostly-subtraction 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. Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai context-engineering agents https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT building agents architecture https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai building product https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT building product design https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT building architecture product https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT building agents cto https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT building product design https://kachar.dev/blog/build-for-the-model-youll-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.' Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai architecture building https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai agents context-engineering https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai context-engineering building https://kachar.dev/blog/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. Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai evals building https://kachar.dev/blog/a-bigger-model-wont-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. Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT ai context-engineering building https://kachar.dev/blog/three-innovation-tokens 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. Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT cto architecture building