Strong Opinions and Philosophies
Opinion bank for Kevin's operator, startup, and agent-infrastructure takes. Use this before drafting social posts, recruiting answers, or founder-facing explanations.
Forward-Deployed Engineering
Forward-deployed engineering means building a complete intuition for the product and company.
The unit of understanding is not one repo or one ticket. The unit is the whole company system:
- what customers feel,
- what ships,
- what breaks,
- how billing works,
- how auth works,
- how the website explains the product,
- how demos land,
- how the team shares context,
- where the next bottleneck is going to appear.
The strongest early engineers carry context across surfaces. Infra makes docs sharper. Customers make APIs cleaner. Billing reveals product edge cases. The website reveals where company narrative and technical reality are misaligned.
Full-Stack Product Engineering
"Full-stack" at an early startup means the whole product surface.
That includes obvious surfaces:
- UI,
- backend,
- auth,
- billing,
- docs,
- demos,
- dashboards.
It also includes hidden user-facing surfaces:
- firewalls,
- fraud checks,
- SEO/GEO,
llms.txt,- crawlers and sitemaps,
- admin visibility,
- customer prototypes,
- internal tools.
Infrastructure becomes valuable when users can understand it, trust it, and build on it.
Agents Need Computers
The agent infrastructure primitive is moving from sandbox to computer.
Sandboxes were built for CI:
- spin up,
- run command,
- throw it away.
Agents behave more like developers:
- install dependencies,
- learn repos,
- run servers,
- leave files around,
- open browsers,
- come back later,
- continue from context.
That requires persistence: a durable filesystem, shell, tools, memory, preview URLs, and a machine identity that survives the session.
Better prompts help. Better environments change what agents can become.
Tribal Knowledge Compounds
Tribal knowledge is one of the easiest things to waste at a startup.
Someone learns why billing works a certain way. Someone learns the customer edge case that explains a product decision. Someone learns the migration path that avoids three days of pain. Then the team context switches and the lesson disappears.
The fix:
- write it down,
- link it,
- turn it into a playbook,
- automate the repeated part.
A wiki is a way of making context survive the person who learned it. A small team compounds when its knowledge compounds.
Agency Removes Repeated Taxes
The key daily question:
What is the highest-impact thing I can do today?
Sometimes the answer is a feature. Often it is quieter:
- write the migration that unblocks three future projects,
- build the dashboard that turns debugging into a 30-second answer,
- fix docs so the next customer does not need a call,
- refactor the flow creating support debt,
- automate the manual process wasting everyone's morning.
Agency is noticing where the company pays the same tax repeatedly, then removing the tax.
Curiosity Is A Startup Skill
Curiosity is the ability to download enough of a domain to be useful, apply it, and turn the lesson into shared context.
At Dedalus, the domains include microVMs, auth, billing, fraud, firewalls, SEO, developer docs, agent workflows, customer demos, design, internal tooling, and culture.
Curiosity that stays private is interesting. Curiosity that becomes docs, tools, playbooks, dashboards, or automations becomes infrastructure.
The best engineers debug their process as aggressively as they debug their code.
Culture Is Infrastructure
Social chair work is infrastructure.
Escape rooms, team dinners, restaurants, and rituals sound separate from engineering, but they shape the trust layer of the company.
A team that trusts each other moves faster. A team that enjoys the room shares context more freely. A team with real relationships handles conflict better. A team that has fun together survives harder weeks.
The product is built by the relationships inside the team as much as the code inside the repo.
Customer Pull Beats Demo Excitement
A good demo creates interest. A great product creates urgency.
The key questions:
- Who would be upset if this disappeared tomorrow?
- What workflow does this own?
- What usage metric do the founders check every week?
- What customer edge case changed the roadmap?
- What did customers ask for that surprised the team?
- Where is the product already becoming painful to live without?
ARR matters, but ARR can hide product truth. The sharper signal is active pull: customers sending edge cases, expanding usage, asking for migrations, using the product in production, and shaping technical decisions.
The best companies feel like the product is being dragged forward by reality.
Timeline
- 2026-05-12 | Created from Kevin's operator/social drafting session so the strong-opinion material exists outside one-off chat and backlog drafts. Source: User, 2026-05-12