Writing
“If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.”
Essays from the other side of that. And the occasional rant.
Slow publishing on purpose. Posts on product philosophy, money-software decisions, and migration guides — written when there's something worth saying, not when the calendar says to.
Product philosophy · May 23, 2026 · 6 min read
Why your budget app doesn't need an AI assistant
Every finance app is racing to add an AI chat assistant. Here's why we aren't, why financial data is the worst fit for generative models, and what your money actually needs instead.
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Engineering · May 20, 2026 · 12 min read
The chart interaction Mercury and Copilot ship that almost nobody else does
Path-interpolated cursor marking with TradingView Lightweight Charts. The visual difference between premium fintech charts and generic dashboard charts is ~180 lines of TypeScript — here's the full technique, plus the UTC and theme bridges you have to solve to ship it.
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Privacy · May 13, 2026 · 10 min read
What 'private' actually means in a finance app
Most personal finance apps say they're private. They mean different things. The architectural difference between 'we don't show ads' and 'we never had the data' — named, cited, named names.
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Product philosophy · Apr 23, 2026 · 7 min read
Why Arden starts with a file, not a bank login
The bank login isn't a feature. It's a failure mode the category convinced itself was mandatory. Here's what changes when you treat CSV import as the primary path.
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