ESSAY
Steering Beats Scale
When scale outruns the feedback loop, numbers rot.
Essays by Frank Chen, co-founder and CTO of Balto Energy, on AI agents, knowledge systems, developer infrastructure, and behavior design—what actually ships vs. what demos well.
ESSAY
The Company as a Codebase
Every workflow ships two artifacts: the result, and a versioned improvement to the system that produced it.
ESSAY
Blue-Collar AI Is an Observability Problem
ESSAY
FD(x): Forward Deploy to Solve the Untrainable
ESSAY
What It Feels Like to Rebuild a Company Around a Graph
ESSAY
The Handoff Was the Bug. Vertical AI Is the Rewrite.
ESSAY
The Operations CEO Doesn't Wait for the Dashboard
ESSAY
The Moat Is What You Capture
ESSAY
We Built the Enterprise Brain. It Was the Easy Part.
ESSAY
Our AI Onboards New Hires Better Than We Do
ESSAY
We Put Our Entire Company's Brain in a Git Repo
FIELD NOTE