Hello, world!
By Garrett,
It’s been a while since I sat behind the wheel of a fresh new website.
The last first blog post I wrote was in 2014 shortly after starting Good Work, the web development agency that I started and ran for over 10 years. Before that was Erskine Design and before that was a web design company I started in college. If you add it all together I’ve spent 18 long years in digital client services.
With my last business, Good Work, I followed the classic maker-to-business-owner trajectory—doing what I loved (making things), then gradually delegating my work to others until, before I knew it, I wasn’t making anything at all!
I spent most of 2024 thinking through my purpose and what I should do next. I considered everything from operations consulting for digital service businesses to riding the silver tsunami and purchasing a 20-30 year old blue collar business. Every few months I came to my wife with a new idea for our future, and she somehow patiently cheered on each one of them. I got pretty far into a few ideas before realizing that I couldn’t see myself doing any of it! Back to the drawing board…
One day I was speaking to Phil about this conundrum and through conversation, I remembered an old known that I had lost sight of: I was born to make stuff on the internet. After about five seconds of back and forth it became incredibly clear that the next step was to start the last business I’ll ever work at; a little software studio called Better Than Good.
Looking back, the best moments of my career were when I was deep in the details: designing, coding, and creating. And that’s what Better than good is all about—meticulously creating software that is fast, simple, and a joy to use.
Our first app will launch sometime this summer, available on the web, iOS, and Mac. I’ll be sharing the journey on this blog along the way.
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More from the blog
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Bloated: how chat made you fat
> It helps to remember the time you save generating a document is not free. It is borrowed from every person who has to read it, at interest, and the longer the distribution list the worse the rate of return.The pitch for writing with a language model is that it saves you time: you describe the memo, the model produces it and 90 seconds later you have four pages (okay, maybe forty) instead of a blank document. Someone still has to read those pages though. The model did not remove that work. It just moved it downstream to your colleagues or suppliers, and on the way it produced more than any h…
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Apple’s bicycle without a chain
Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. Apple Intelligence so far is more like a bicycle with no chain. The frame is gorgeous, and the engineering is extraordinary, but you cannot get far with it.In early 2025, Xe Iaso published a [piece that landed like a brick through a window](https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/squandered-holy-grail/) in the Apple developer community. The argument was simple and damning: Apple had built the holy grail of trusted compute with Private Cloud Compute, a genuinely unprecedented piece of security infrastructure, only to fill it with half-baked not…
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Weeknotes vol. 17: business, schmizness
Hello and happy casual weeknotes Friday.I stopped writing these [about a year ago](/blog/weeknotes-16/) when I began the transition into consulting (solving fun and challenging problems), and to say a lot has changed since then would be the understatement of the century.In summary: [Iain](/blog/iain/) joined full time, we're helping people solve operational problems and optimize their work across pretty much all aspects of business, and we're having a lot of fun doing it. Iain has his masters in AI for Business, which has pushed me to go down the biggest rabbit hole I've been down since HTML/…
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The ten trillion dollar gamble
In November 2025, on stage at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event, the chief financial officer of OpenAI was asked how her company planned to honor roughly $1.4 trillion in compute contracts on $13 billion of revenue. Sarah Friar said she was looking to assemble a network of banks, private equity, and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee." By the following evening, she had posted to LinkedIn explaining that "backstop" had muddied the point, that what she meant was something more like a public-private partnership, and that the United States government has been "incredibly forward-leaning" …
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Never talk about goblins
Buried in a JSON file that OpenAI [posted to GitHub recently](https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/66b0781502be5de3b1909525c987643b9e5e407d/codex-rs/models-manager/models.json), inside the configuration for its newest coding agent, sits an instruction that reads like a footnote written by someone losing their composure. “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” The line appears [more than once](https://gizmodo.com/never-talk-about-goblins-openais-instructions-to-…
