Fifteen years building product, mostly in the parts nobody documents.

I've spent 15 years in product: mechanical engineer, first PM at a startup, now employee #2 at a seed-stage govtech company where everything is ambiguous all the time. Cold Work is where I think out loud about the gap between what organizations know and what they think they know.

The name comes from metalworking. Cold working is shaping metal below its recrystallization point: you shape it cold, and it hardens as you go. The material's own resistance to change is what makes it stronger.

The idea running through everything here is the temper line, the boundary on a blade where hard steel meets soft steel. The hard edge cuts. The soft spine keeps the blade from shattering when it hits, and the whole craft is in where you put the transition. Organizations have the same boundary between documented intent and lived practice, and that gap never closes. The craft I care about is working inside it.

Cold Work is where I practice that: essays when I'm working out an opinion, small tools when I want to hold myself to one. The tools take real positions on how product work should be done, and I use them on my own work before asking anyone else to.

Some of the thinking ships as software beyond this site. The Temper Line skills (same name as the essay series, because they came out of it) are instruction packs for Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. One keeps a ledger of my predictions, each with a confidence number, so I can score my judgment against what actually happened. The other tracks the agreed wording of a strategy, so when the language drifts, someone notices and decides on purpose.

I'm not an engineer, and I didn't write the code for Intervals, which is real, deployed software. I scope the work into tickets, a system of AI agents builds overnight, and nothing ships until an independent automated review comes back clean and I approve it. Running that system turns out to be product work of a familiar kind: writing specs precise enough that someone else, in this case something else, can build from them.