# Hey, I'm Jon.

I build digital products at the intersection of design and code. Fueled by storytelling and a genuine obsession with making useful things. I share insights from the trenches of creating what actually matters in my [newsletter](https://joncphillips.com/newsletter/).

## Articles

- [No Natural Limit](https://joncphillips.com/no-natural-limit/): September 6, 2026. I burned through 20 billion Claude tokens in the last 30 days.
- [The Wrong Room](https://joncphillips.com/the-wrong-room/): August 30, 2026. I launched a photography tool about eight months ago and many devs I showed it to loved it.
- [Type The Repo Name](https://joncphillips.com/type-the-repo-name/): August 23, 2026. To delete a repo on GitHub you have to type its name in a box.
- [Nothing To See Here Yet](https://joncphillips.com/nothing-to-see-here-yet/): August 9, 2026. The first thing users see is the thing you designed least.
- [Learning to Wait Again](https://joncphillips.com/learning-to-wait-again/): August 2, 2026. I've been trying to slow down lately, and I suck at it.
- [Six Out of Ten](https://joncphillips.com/six-out-of-ten/): July 26, 2026. Your email platform says 99% delivery. It's meaningless.
- [Unwritten Ideas Don't Count](https://joncphillips.com/unwritten-ideas-dont-count/): July 19, 2026. I spent years unable to explain a decision I made every day.
- [The Code You Didn't Write](https://joncphillips.com/the-code-you-didnt-write/): July 12, 2026. Malicious code ran on my machine before I knew it was there.
- [Designing for One](https://joncphillips.com/designing-for-one/): July 5, 2026. Building things only you will ever use is kinda fun.
- [Judgment Bottleneck](https://joncphillips.com/judgment-bottleneck/): June 28, 2026. I'm faster with AI than without it. Most days, noticeably so.
- [The Subject Is a Vehicle](https://joncphillips.com/the-subject-is-a-vehicle/): June 21, 2026. My stepdaughter just finished her Masters.
- [An Audience of Agents](https://joncphillips.com/an-audience-of-agents/): June 14, 2026. AI agents now visit more web pages than humans do.
- [The Slop Floor](https://joncphillips.com/the-slop-floor/): June 7, 2026. AI-generated has become the baseline of every creative niche.
- [Less, Eventually](https://joncphillips.com/less-eventually/): May 31, 2026. I recently swapped a contact form for a plain mailto: link.
- [Manufactured Urgency](https://joncphillips.com/manufactured-urgency/): May 23, 2026. I didn’t really work for three days.
- [The Day Job Question](https://joncphillips.com/the-day-job-question/): May 10, 2026. Indie hacker advice says quit your job.
- [Self-Hosting Renaissance](https://joncphillips.com/self-hosting-renaissance/): May 3, 2026. Why I never moved to managed services.
- [One Repo, Two Distributions](https://joncphillips.com/one-repo-two-distributions/): April 25, 2026. Running open source and paid SaaS versions of the same thing.
- [Nobody Clicks Anymore](https://joncphillips.com/nobody-clicks-anymore/): April 18, 2026. What SEO became when Google stopped sending traffic.
- [Getting Uncomfortable](https://joncphillips.com/getting-uncomfortable/): April 12, 2026. Growth lives on the other side of the thing you keep avoiding.
- [Is it Just Plumbing?](https://joncphillips.com/is-it-just-plumbing/): April 4, 2026. What autonomous AI agents actually are under the hood.
- [The Cleanup Tax](https://joncphillips.com/the-cleanup-tax/): March 29, 2026. You always pay for the shortcuts.
- [What AI Can’t Kill](https://joncphillips.com/what-ai-cant-kill/): March 21, 2026. The four layers that survive every model update.
- [But Is It Legit?](https://joncphillips.com/but-is-it-legit/): March 14, 2026. The indie hacker hierarchy is bullshit, and I fell for it anyway.
- [Build Your Own Table](https://joncphillips.com/build-your-own-table/): March 7, 2026. The psychological cost of building someone else’s dream.
- [The Second Product](https://joncphillips.com/the-second-product/): February 28, 2026. The psychological cost of running too many things at once.
- [Competing With Free](https://joncphillips.com/competing-with-free/): February 21, 2026. Why paying customers win when zero costs everything.
- [The Trust Layer](https://joncphillips.com/the-trust-layer/): February 14, 2026. The piping was never the hard part.
- [What I’d Build Differently](https://joncphillips.com/what-id-build-differently/): February 7, 2026. 20 years of recalibrations that all point to the same place.
- [Software With a Spine](https://joncphillips.com/software-with-a-spine/): February 1, 2026. Every app has a chat box now...
- [Human Ambition](https://joncphillips.com/human-ambition/): January 25, 2026. This article might not age well. I’m writing it anyway.
- [The Stack Discourse](https://joncphillips.com/the-stack-discourse/): January 18, 2026. Or, why I stopped caring about tech choices.
- [Hey, Nobody’s Coming](https://joncphillips.com/hey-nobodys-coming/): January 11, 2026. You shipped. Congratulations. Now what?
- [You're Two Weeks Behind](https://joncphillips.com/youre-two-weeks-behind/): January 4, 2026. Welcome to 2026. Did you really take two weeks off?
- [The Unsexy Parts](https://joncphillips.com/the-unsexy-parts/): December 21, 2025. The reason nobody talks about their DNS configuration.
- [Monthly Recurring Profit](https://joncphillips.com/monthly-recurring-profit/): December 14, 2025. We need to talk about MRR screenshots.
- [Ship It Scared](https://joncphillips.com/ship-it-scared/): December 7, 2025. Your scared self will always move the goalposts.
- [Engineering the Transition](https://joncphillips.com/engineering-the-transition/): November 30, 2025. How ownership gets manufactured before payment.
- [What Viable Really Means](https://joncphillips.com/what-viable-really-means/): November 23, 2025. The MVP paradox: why "ship fast" advice misses the point.
- [Debugging Your Decisions](https://joncphillips.com/debugging-your-decisions/): November 16, 2025. Deploy a feature, watch it flop, fire up the debugger.
- [Onboarding Is A Lie](https://joncphillips.com/onboarding-is-a-lie/): November 9, 2025. Why good products don't need onboarding tours at all.
- [Delete Means Nothing](https://joncphillips.com/delete-means-nothing/): November 2, 2025. Each destructive action should be reversible, not preventable.
- [Zero Dollar Distance](https://joncphillips.com/zero-dollar-distance/): October 26, 2025. Why free and paid are entirely different products.
- [Homogeneous by Design](https://joncphillips.com/homogeneous-by-design/): October 12, 2025. The creativity recession and why everything looks the same now.
- [Documenting The Mess](https://joncphillips.com/documenting-the-mess/): October 5, 2025. Building a personal archive of everything that went wrong.
- [The Convenience Trap](https://joncphillips.com/the-convenience-trap/): September 28, 2025. Every convenience we add creates a new dependency.
- [Why I’m anti-VC](https://joncphillips.com/why-im-anti-vc/): September 21, 2025. or: the math doesn’t work unless you’re delusional.
- [The Interface Paradox](https://joncphillips.com/the-interface-paradox/): September 14, 2025. Why we need both chat and navigation.
- [Living in the Maybe Zone](https://joncphillips.com/living-in-the-maybe-zone/): September 7, 2025. Nobody talks about the months (or years) of living in maybe.
- [Vibe Coding From Anywhere](https://joncphillips.com/vibe-coding-from-anywhere/): August 31, 2025. Building a $10/mo portable development environment.