Essays by Ry Walker

From managed solutions like Lindy and Manus to self-hosted alternatives like ZeroClaw and Pi — here's the complete landscape of personal AI agent platforms.

A visual guide to the emerging AI agent ecosystem — from foundation lab tools to enterprise in-house agents, and everything in between.

How to champion open source within your organization — from grassroots adoption to executive buy-in and sustainable engagement.

A framework for evaluating open source projects beyond star counts — looking at velocity, community health, and commercial viability.

A curated list of podcasts that have shaped my thinking on startups, technology, and building companies.

Why we're building Tembo: AI coding agents should be orchestrated, not operated. The vision for enterprise-grade agent infrastructure.

A first-hand take on Claude Code 4.6: better context retention, smarter questions, and a workflow that finally feels like real pair programming.

AI outbound scales noise, not trust. Why cold outreach is saturated in 2025 and how warm, relevant paths still win.

A case for genuine positivity in leadership: it compounds encouragement, builds resilience, and avoids toxic positivity.

Developer performance is hard to measure; AI adds noisy signals. A case for outcome-focused frameworks over vanity metrics.

Why rigid metrics can slow decisions when data is noisy, and how intuition plus small experiments can guide better calls.

Most developers use AI only to write code. The real opportunity is using AI to secure, debug, and test—deploying equal firepower on defense.

AI-assisted development has changed the economics of code quality. Teams shipping "good enough" code are moving faster than craftperfectionists.

Survey results from 399 developers reveal what's broken in modern software development: focus time, AI tools, and distribution top the list.

The three tiers of AI coding adoption: from assisted tools to autonomous background agents. Why 80% of code will be AI-written within a decade.

The AI-First Software Development Manifesto: 11 principles for treating AI as a true development partner, not a fancy autocomplete.

A step-by-step framework for testing startup ideas: talk to users, fake the demo, iterate until you know what to build. Don't write code yet.

Open source your core, build a SaaS around it ASAP, and keep both flywheels spinning. How to balance community and commercial traction.

A battle-tested framework for seed-stage pitches: the four pillars that matter (product, team, traction, market) and five steps to nail them.

A self-assessment and prescriptions for becoming data-driven: hire a data scientist, establish a warehouse, and track your Daily ETL Tasks.

How fundraising really works: you'll get a pile of 'no' and a smaller pile of 'maybe.' Without a potential lead in that maybe pile, you're not ready.

How Astronomer evolved from USERcycle analytics to a data engineering platform. The organic growth from clickstream to Apache Airflow to Kafka.

Could Daily ETL Tasks be an effective indicator for how data-driven your organization is? A thought experiment inspired by Airbnb's data infrastructure.

The story of leaving safe jobs and comfortable positions to build companies—Differential, then Astronomer—because I had no other choice.

Our journey through AngelPad as the first Midwest team ever accepted. From application to Demo Day, here's what the top-ranked accelerator is really like.

Data silos are a growing problem as SaaS proliferates. How cloud computing, mobile, and machine learning are creating a data revolution.

Should early-stage SaaS companies do professional services? Advice from Brad Feld, Hiten Shah, and other investors on the product vs. services dilemma.

Most startup advice focuses on product and marketing. Retention gets far less airtime—and that's a shame, because it's where most products die.

Build something astonishing for your early adopters. Measure their amazement across education, setup, and ongoing value—then track your improvement.