paul@houseofpaul ~ % cat intro.md
I'm Paul — a developer writing about the tools I build, the mistakes I learn from, and the strange, satisfying overlap between engineering and creativity. New posts most weeks, always written by hand.
Fresh from the blog
Short write-ups on the things I build, break, and eventually understand.
Featured
The same reasoning that produces a mistake explains it away just as convincingly on the second pass. Here's when a second, adversarial agent is worth the extra inference cost — and when it isn't.
Read moreNous Research's Hermes Agent isn't a chatbot or an IDE copilot — it's a self-hosted daemon with persistent memory that writes its own skills and gets smarter every day.
Read moreMCP went from an Anthropic proposal to a cross-vendor standard in barely a year. Here is what the Model Context Protocol actually is, and why it matters if you build agents.
Read moreSyntax is now a commodity and intent is the only moat. Five surprising realities of agentic engineering in 2026 - from why the harness beats the model to the 19% verification tax.
Read moreWho's writing this
Hi, I'm Paul. I'm a software developer who's spent the last decade building products — from scrappy weekend prototypes to systems running in production for thousands of users. House of Paul is where I write about the parts of the job that don't fit in a pull request description: the trade-offs, the dead ends, and the small decisions that end up mattering most.
When I'm not writing or shipping, I'm usually taking something apart to see how it works — code, coffee gear, doesn't matter — and looking for the next thing worth being curious about.
Technologies I reach for
What I care about
Code should read like it was written for a person, not just a compiler.
Curiosity first — I'd rather try the weird idea than assume it won't work.
Fast software is a feature. I sweat the milliseconds users actually feel.
The best solutions come from arguing (kindly) with people smarter than me.