The Design Career That Survives AI
After 12 years as VP of Product Design, I watched three paradigm shifts. The skills that survived every one are the same skills AI can't replace.
Design & UXWriting
Thoughts on design, development, AI infrastructure, and building products.
How LLMs See Text: What My i18n System Taught Me About Token Economics
Translating my site into 6 languages revealed that Korean costs 2.8x more tokens than English for identical content. The interactive visualizer below shows why.
AI & TechnologyMental Compound Interest: How Cross-Domain Knowledge Built My Best Tools
Design + engineering + AI produced tools none of those skills alone could build. An interactive calculator and the cross-domain advantage in practice.
Systems & ProductivityThe Pathless Path: How I Left a 12-Year VP Role to Build 12 Projects
I left VP of Product Design at ZipRecruiter after 12 years to build independently. No plan, no destination, just curiosity and a financial runway.
Career & GrowthClaude Code + Cursor: What 30 Sessions of Combined Usage Taught Me
I tracked 30 development sessions using Claude Code and Cursor together. The data shows where each tool wins and where the combination fails.
AI DevelopmentCritical Yet Kind: How I Encoded Feedback Principles into 86 Hooks
Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety predicts team performance. I encoded the same principles into automated code review hooks.
Career & GrowthColor Science for Interface Designers: What I Learned Building a Zero-Color Site
I built a site with no colors — just white on absolute black with four opacity layers. Here's the color science that made the decision work.
Design & UXDesign Systems for Startups: How I Built Mine Backwards
I built my design system backwards — tokens first, components never. After a CLS bug taught me the cost of skipping tokens, I stopped debating when to invest.
Design & UXBeauty and Brutalism: How I Designed blakecrosley.com at the Intersection
I built my site at the intersection of beauty and brutalism: structural honesty with precise typography on absolute black.
Design & UXThe OODA Loop for Prompt Engineering: What Five Failures Taught Me
Five prompt failures taught me that structured observation beats clever wording. Boyd's OODA loop maps directly to the prompt engineering workflow I use daily.
AI & TechnologyThe Startup Validation Stack: What 12 Projects Taught Me About Evidence
I validated 12 projects in 9 months. Some followed the framework. Some skipped steps. The difference in outcomes taught me which evidence actually matters.
Career & GrowthCompounding Engineering: How My Codebase Accelerates Instead of Decaying
Most codebases slow down as they grow. Mine accelerates. The difference: 95 hooks, 44 skills, and 14 configs that make each new feature cheaper than the last.
AI & TechnologyExternal Publications
Technical writing at Introl
Local LLM Hardware Pricing Guide 2025
Comprehensive hardware recommendations and cost analysis for running large language models locally.
H100 vs. H200 vs. B200: Choosing the Right NVIDIA GPUs for Your AI Workload
GPU selection guide comparing NVIDIA's latest datacenter accelerators for different AI workloads.
TPU Architecture: Complete Guide to Google's 7 Generations
Deep technical dive into Google's Tensor Processing Unit evolution from TPUv1 to TPUv5.
GPU Memory Pooling in Multi-Tenant Kubernetes
Resource sharing strategies for GPU clusters in containerized environments.
Ray Clusters: Distributed AI Computing Infrastructure
Guide to building and managing distributed AI computing with Ray framework.
DeepSeek V3 Open Source AI Cost Advantage
Analysis of open source LLM economics and DeepSeek's competitive positioning.
NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU 600kW Racks 2027
Future datacenter power requirements and NVIDIA's next-generation GPU roadmap.
SMR Nuclear Power for AI Data Centers
Small modular reactor solutions for powering next-generation AI infrastructure.
DeepSeek MHC Architecture Breakthrough
Technical analysis of DeepSeek's Multi-Head Compression architecture innovations.