For want of futures: wherein possibilities are imagined, but not financial instruments

https://buttondown.com/therealadam/archive/for-want-of-futures/

Yeah, I’ve locked in to a few writing and coding sessions with The Social Network soundtrack. But, have you ever tried locking in to something you can move your hips to?

Related: currently compiling a list of Soundtracks That Didn’t Have To Go So Hard, and Prince’s Batman is way up there. https://music.apple.com/us/album/batman/213038820

Wrapping up lil’ document editor “research”, starting to write more on it. In short: cross-platform in the Apple ecosystem is possible, but tricky once you get into third-party libraries. Agent coding makes a lot possible, but doesn’t make anything trivial. Prototypes without a plan for using it regularly, at least in the process of building the thing, are not going to generate useful insight.

False spring has passed ... https://therealadam.com/2026/03/07/wrapping-up-lil-document-editor.html

Squeeze out the trickiest part of the problem, another part of the problem becomes the trickiest. A tale as old as time.

"Today, it seems like the biggest opportunities will be in the third of my opening statements. Building systems remains hard. Can I assume you’re familiar with Amdahl’s Law? That’s what’s going on: a massive speed up on a portion of the problem, but as that portion speeds up it becomes less and less ... https://therealadam.com/2026/03/01/squeeze-out-the-trickiest-part.html

Blogging (Classic): https://therealadam.com/2026/02/24/blogging-classic.html

Wherein you need feeds, notes, and documents.

I love when/what Matt Webb builds:

"It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease.

— mist: Share and edit Markdown together, quickly"

We need more “this (thing) should be as easy to collaborate on as Google Docs” sort of things in the world. Granted, I’m not a fan of writing ... https://therealadam.com/2026/02/16/i-love-whenwhat-matt-webb.html

Contra my optimism on software estimates, some realism:

"I gather as much political context as possible before I even look at the code. How much pressure is on this project? Is it a casual ask, or do we have to find a way to do this? What kind of estimate is my management chain looking for? There’s a huge difference between “the CTO really wants this in one week” and “we were looking for work for your team and this ... https://therealadam.com/2026/02/10/contra-my-optimism-on-software.html