Essays on documents, AI, productivity, and the future of work.
The real value of a proposal isn't the PDF — it's the thinking you did to write it.
Digital documents changed organizations more than the internet did. The shift from filing cabinets to search bars rewired how companies think.
PDF was invented in 1993 and nothing has replaced it. Because it solved the right problem: making documents look the same everywhere.
AI is great at generating text but terrible at the last mile — formatting, signing, delivering, tracking. The unsexy infrastructure matters most.
From wax seals to e-signatures: why we trust a squiggly line on a document. It's about commitment, not verification.
We were promised the paperless office in 1975. We use more paper than ever. What went wrong, and what's actually changing now.
For startups, manually handling every contract and invoice teaches you what to automate later.
Compressing a PDF is a form of intelligence — deciding what information matters. This is fundamentally what AI does too.
Forms are the most underrated UI pattern. Tax forms, medical forms, job applications — they're how institutions talk to individuals.
The most successful software solves boring problems. Document processing is boring. That's exactly why it's a massive market.
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