Essays by Ry Walker

Essays on AI, startups, and software engineering by Ry Walker, founder of Tembo and Astronomer.

all agents ai apis architecture

astronomer automation bottleneck build-vs-buy business-model code-review coding-agents communication competition context context-engineering coordination culture customer-development customer-success data decision-making developer-experience developer-tools devex economics engineering enterprise evaluation experience founders fundraising future go-to-market governance growth gtm human-in-the-loop incentives infrastructure integration intuition judgment knowledge-management knowledge-work kubernetes leadership learning maintenance management market marketing measurement memory moats nuance observability open-source operationalization operations outbound personal personal-agents personalization phases pitching platform platforms playbook process procurement product prototyping quality rag reasoning recommendations retention review sales security seed shipping skills software-engineering startups storytelling strategy

tembo tooling trust unit-economics workflow

Apr 30, 2026	Inspectable Logic, Not Black Box Magic Most agent projects die because nobody can explain why the agent did what it did. The fix is non-obvious — agent logic should be permanent, inspectable code, not a regenerated prompt.
Apr 23, 2026	The Algorithm Should Be Inspectable Trust is the bottleneck for agent adoption, not capability. Hide the logic in a prompt and people stop using it. Make it inspectable code and they iterate with you.
Feb 1, 2026	The Trust Collapse in B2B Outbound AI doesn't write bad cold emails. It writes good ones. And good cold emails are now suspicious — that's the uncanny valley of sales, and it's killing response rates.