Will Hackett
I’m Will, co-founder and CTO of flowstate (we’re hiring). Mostly software, AI and economics. Occasionally a minor inconvenience becomes an essay with sources.
All writing
2026
- The impossibility of measuring AI productivity
- Never store data you don't need
- Two agents I use to stay focused
- Apple's monopoly on coherence
- Buy tokens, rent GPUs, or own the rack?
- The Frontier
- Every worktree gets its own database
- US Gov just killed Fable (for now)
- Fable 5 isn't a new Opus, it's a new ceiling
- A classifier is mostly plumbing
- Locking the new Siri out of the EU market is strange
- Turn a $3m AI bill into $1.9m
- Slightly coherent rant about a menu
- On writing
- Observations on AI agent token consumption
- How do you tell who's thinking?
- Peter Whitehouse – teaching over measurement
- Some things never change
- My advice to a younger me
- 12 seconds to scan 3,000 rows, oops
- Workforce Engineering has always existed. We just never named it.
- What is Workforce Engineering, and how do you achieve flow state?
- Boring is better: Pushing 67k telemetry events per second into Postgres
- Amortizing a hallucination
- AI agents won't kill your system of record. Your rate limits will.
- Digital ID done right: verifiable claims without the surveillance
- Why I moved to Microsoft 365
- Digital sovereignty requires funding, not just adoption
- The best engineering teams can turn on a dime
2025
- Agentic coding is changing the engineering workforce, just not how you think
- Reclaiming the commons: the case for an accountable internet
- Moore's Law for AI is officially dead
- Big teams, small team energy
- Search kind of sucks now
- How do you explain the £20M engineering spend?
- Fixing email spam with AI: When traditional filters aren't enough
- Pragmatic: Lessons from building (and winding down) an AI startup
- Analytics is fine, tracking is the problem
- AI everywhere is AI nowhere
- Escaping the AI cost trap
- Web 4.0: The Pragmatic Internet
- Berlin Airport reflections: on polymaths, ownership and execution
- How to Not Decrypt WhatsApp Web (But Still Win)
- Teaching AI to feel: the architecture of emotional intelligence
- Stop reinventing the wheel
- Know your Geebos
- Don't take the cloud call - focus on your startup
- Your website is pissing people off
- Invest in integrations, not the platforms
- How to actually get things built
- UK Pensions just aren't as good as Australian Superannuation
- Getting started today
- I think BunnyCDN is the first real European answer to Cloudflare
- The pitfalls of iCloud Mail - systematic failures and user hostility
- The cultural cost of a bad hire
- Tinfoil hat moment this evening, could Cloudflare be an NSA front?
- I think B2C is the best way to a successful B2B product
- Friday night code sessions - a lazy CleanShot X alternative
- It's 2025, and JIRA is still clunky