What I'm doing now.

Shipped Inkwell (github.com/vscarpenter/inkwell), a pure-CSS design system for product UI: four CSS files, no build step, ten components, light + dark, and an optional Tailwind v4 theme that consumes the same tokens. Live at inkwell.vinny.dev. The thesis behind it — stunning UIs aren't designed, they're enforced. Inkwell is what makes the enforcement cheap enough to actually hold the line at 11pm on a side project.

All in on OpenClaw: hardening the production setup, tightening security, and optimizing model routing and usage patterns.

Consolidated my earlier multi-instance experiments into one focused effort to make it genuinely reliable.

Rebuilt vinny.dev around a tighter editorial system — the May 2026 'Technical Craft' refresh (Geist, a single electric-blue accent, an accent period on every page H1) and two new top-nav destinations: Point of View for the durable thesis and Radar for what I'm tracking this quarter.

The site is now its own working argument about consistency.

"What to Make of a Life" by Jim Collins, a reflective read from the author of Good to Great on the questions worth organizing a life around.

"The Obstacle Is the Way" by Ryan Holiday, a Stoic playbook for turning friction into the path forward.

A useful counterweight to a quarter spent shipping fast and second-guessing harder.

What a design system needs when LLMs are first-class consumers: token naming that survives a code-gen pass, component APIs that don't leak Tailwind specifics, docs that double as agent prompts.

Inkwell is the current test bed; the broader question is what this does to the apprenticeship path that made senior designers senior in the first place.

Agentic AI for the enterprise SDLC: separating genuine productivity from tool sprawl, and figuring out which patterns actually help teams ship.

Claude Code skills as a pattern for encoding senior-engineer workflows: where they outperform raw prompting, and where they just add friction.

How to measure and improve developer experience without adding more surveys to people's plates.

The balance between standardization and team autonomy in large engineering organizations.

What the Anthropic release cadence is doing to enterprise adoption: Design, Cowork, Chrome, Excel, Mac, Opus 4.7 all landing inside a single planning cycle.

Where does governance even attach when the surface area changes every two weeks?

What it means that a year of writing collapsed into a single sentence — the bottleneck is never the stack — and how that reframes which engineering investments actually move the work forward versus which ones just feel like progress.

AI populism as a builder's problem (h/t Jasmine Sun's warning-shots piece): what sociopolitical alignment looks like as an actual line item on an engineering leader's plate, not a press-release responsibility someone else handles.

The future of learning in an AI-native world: when models can explain anything on demand, what does it actually mean to build expertise, and how should engineers (and kids) learn differently from here?