Search kind of sucks now
LLMs are fundamentally breaking the internet's business model. Publishers are losing billions in ad revenue, search results are confidently wrong, and content creation is becoming economically unviabl...
Will Hackett
I'm Will, a software engineer based in London and the CTO at Flowstate. We're building real-time workforce modelling for engineering teams—giving engineering and finance leaders the data they need without drowning in spreadsheets.
Recent Notes
How do you explain the £20M engineering spend?
Why software engineering organisations struggle to answer basic questions about costs, how PE scrutiny is changing the game and introducing the Flowstate Method for workforce planning.
Fixing email spam with AI: When traditional filters aren't enough
89% of malicious emails bypass SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Your inbox is already compromised—authentication protocols failed and nobody told you. Here's how AI catches what traditional filters miss.
Pragmatic: Lessons from building (and winding down) an AI startup
Reflections on building Jamie, an AI assistant for email, and the decision to wind down Pragmatic after not finding product-market fit.
Analytics is fine, tracking is the problem
Analytics is curiosity about what works. Tracking is surveillance. I run Umami on Vercel with Neon Postgres for zero-cost, banner-free analytics. The irony? My joke LLM needs consent, but tracking 16,...
AI everywhere is AI nowhere
The tech industry's rush to embed AI into every product is creating exhausted users and half-baked features. Real AI success comes from solving specific problems, not sprinkling chatbots everywhere.
Escaping the AI cost trap
AI feels cheap today because VCs are footing the bill. But that trickle-down model is broken — and the way forward is open source, smarter infra and owning your baseline compute.
Web 4.0: The Pragmatic Internet
My take on the next version of the web given the failures of Web 3.0 and the need for a more organised, user-centric approach.
Berlin Airport reflections: on polymaths, ownership and execution
Reflections on meeting a team of scrappy, multi-faceted engineers and what makes the best startups work
How to Not Decrypt WhatsApp Web (But Still Win)
A tale of 6,000 f-bombs and one accidental victory. What started as a simple integration for Jamie turned into a deep dive through WhatsApp's encryption, the Signal Protocol, and eventually finding a ...
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