Welcome to The Building Machine

An exploration in the intersection of learning, AI, management, and engineering.

Welcome to The Building Machine.

This is my new Substack newsletter where I’ll share thoughts, opinions, feelings, vibes, rage bait, clickbait, engagement bait, fish bait, and maybe no bait at all about the evolution of software, engineering management, and what it means to work in this world that is been dramatically changing everyday due to A.I.

So what is a building machine or rather what is THE building machine?

Leonardo da Vinci’s “building machine,” c. 1489 — a remarkably early vision of a machine that builds machines to build buildings.

• Is it me?

• Is it this newsletter?

• What is the building machine building?

• Is it a fun riff on software factories, Loop Engineering, Graph Engineering, Hyper Graph Engineering, and Petri Nets that you see all over X? Well maybe not the last two but they’re coming.

• Is it a rebrand of coding machine?

• Is it one of those cool fucking robots that sit on the top of skyscrapers and builds more of the skyscraper?

• Is it a new machine we’ve never seen before that builds the robots that sit on top of the skyscrapers and build more skyscrapers?

I don’t actually know the answer to this question so I started this newsletter to find out. What does the concept of a building machine mean when AI is basically disrupting the entire software industry?

At the end of 2025, I left my big tech job running the Billing team at Stripe to start an AI-pilled, AI-first, super lean company. This was right around the time that Opus 4.5 dropped, a pivotal moment where everything around coding changed.

Antonio Sant’Elia, Study for a Self-Constructing City, c. 1914 — a visionary metropolis of colossal machines building machines, where architecture rises as an instrument of industry, power, and perpetual construction.

For me, the journey started before “the singularity.” As early as May of 2025, I began playing with Cursor and Claude Code. It became clear to me that the future of building software and running eng teams would change. Every month I spent in my current role, where all my time was spent in meetings, doing one-on-ones and supporting the team, was costing valuable time to learn and front-run the massive industrial change coming.

I only know a few people who made similar career choices around that time. They either left their big, org-lead roles to go back to ICs, forcing themselves to learn. Or they left their big tech jobs to become a solo builder or start a company. If you look on X, you probably feel the opposite, that everybody’s doing this, but it’s certainly not true. Even for folks who feel early or seem early, if you actually talk to them they say they’re behind. Certainly that’s how I feel.

It’s been 9 months since I left Stripe; I now spend nearly all of my time building. I have never built so much software and product in my entire life. To that end, I definitely feel like a Building Machine. At the same time, I don’t feel like a high functioning one. Steam comes out of my ears too often. My gears grind and efficiency drops after 5PM. Maintaining focus and context is harder than it’s ever been, and software is but a tiny part of what Building is in the most abstract sense. The rest of my team has their own challenges, and there are not a good set of interchangeable parts to really optimize the whole fleet.

I am still learning how to build The Building Machine, whatever it might turn out to be. And that is what makes this new world so much fun - there is so much to learn and do. I intend to use this newsletter to explore and share what I’m learning. I hope to learn from all of you as well, get feedback and compare notes. Ultimate, democratized AI should let all of us find our own Building Machines. So let’s build!