Biren Shah
Philosophy on economics, business, and life
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Latest posts
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Victory Ledger - May 2026
May was a beast of a month. We started out with just trying to deal with the knock-on effects of splitting the data repo and then moving on to splitting the forging engine repo because it was a significant bottleneck. We ended up breaking the forging engine repo into
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Victory Ledger - April 2026
In April the focus was really starting to take advantage of the infrastructure we had been laying over the previous three months. The biggest example of this is that we now had an event ETL daemon which we call Clio that would let all the logging that we're
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Victory Ledger - March 2026
In March, I was really starting to cook. I figured out that a lot of the code I was working on was going to be useful to all of the future customers of Vulcan Forge. To make it available to them, I split the code into two scopes: Platform-level
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Victory Ledger - February 2026
In February, I was wrestling with how to turn the manual workflows that I'd built via my prompt library into something more like a software application. As impatient as I was, I needed to take the time to build core system infrastructure.
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Introducing Victory Ledgers
A Victory Ledger is something of a progress log with a twist. AI-driven development moves so fast that you really can't keep track of everything that got done.
- 🔥 Building with Voice, Thinking with Fire
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😱 Talking to the Spec — Literally
Something fundamental just shifted. I’ve been refining the product management loop inside Vulcan Forge: the flow from high-level intent → structured requirements → YAML specs → plan layers → codegen. It’s getting tighter. More explicit. More formal. And it’s finally hitting the…
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Disagreeableness: The Forgotten Virtue
I've been working with LLMs quite a lot over the past month, both for development and exploring AI's potential for improving my life as a whole. LLMs today are really different than just two years ago, and the initial "oh my god" feeling is
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High Tactile Coding
I've worked on a lot of software over the past 25 years, mostly as a product manager but also as a developer (especially on data/analysis systems). One experience that I find highly under-rated is what I call "high tactile coding". As product manager, I
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Is 4% the New 2%?
Having managed a card rewards program at Extra, I like to keep an eye on the latest offers just to see how the industry is evolving. Something seems to have changed in 2025. I don't know enough to say why, but a whole slew of companies are starting
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This Too Shall Pass
On the personal side, there are core tenets of my philosophy that have sustained me and guided me across the years. The first is so ancient, it's kind of strange that I'd even need to talk about it: this too shall pass . The transient nature of
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CDX My New Favorite "Safe" Investment
My sister and I have very different investment styles. She's a successful dentist and executive, married to a doctor, with a low risk tolerance. While her income is a lot more stable and predictable than mine, I tend to have bigger "wins" in both my career
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Market Outlook - May 2024
I think we're in the middle of a "Summer of Denial" with everyone hoping things will turn out okay--and a flood of money punishing anyone who dares to place bearish bets too early. The reality on the ground will continue to degrade--making the coming resolution worse when it…
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Price Discovery
"Price discovery" is a simple term to describe an incredibly complex process. It's so complex, you can think of the entire economic existence of everyone alive right now being focused on executing this one thing. At its core, what is a "price"? When we
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How Prices Get Set
The prices we pay for things can be one of the most emotionally charged day-to-day elements of our lives. We get excited when we can afford something previously out of reach. We get angry and frustrated when things we used to be able to buy now start to