David Chung

The Lab

All field notes

Build notes, operating lessons, and the occasional uncomfortable admission from inside the workflow. Newest first.

A glowing circuit-board genie lamp on a dark office desk with a long paper invoice spilling out of it onto the floor.
JUL 12, 2026 ai systems

AI Didn't Fail. The Way We Rolled It Out Did.

A video about AI getting more expensive than the workers it replaced has been sitting in my head. The tech didn't fail. The rollout did, and that's a very human, very fixable problem.

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JUN 15, 2026 building ai

The Best-Disguised Procrastination Has a Roadmap

I almost spent a month building the perfect brain for my AI agents. The deals that pay rent were sitting unclosed the whole time. The bigger the build, the better it hides.

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A building's blueprint that doubles as the deed to the ground it stands on, showing how the structure holds even after the architect has left.
JUN 14, 2026 ai durability

The New Model Is a Blueprint for Surviving Without It

I got access to Fable 5 and the first question was obvious: what can I build? Then the clock showed up. And the question shifted. If I only have two weeks with this, how do I make it last? That question changed everything I did with the time.

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A robot taking a dramatic bow center-stage under a single warm spotlight, an audience applauding in the dark. Below the stage in the unlit orchestra pit, a plain length of metal pipe quietly carries water across, doing the actual work nobody is watching.
JUN 8, 2026 ai agents

Agent Work Is Theatre When Bash Would Do

An agent announcing it will 'set up your knowledge system' and then running the same commands a script would have run. That feels like progress. Often it is theatre.

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A glowing live server endpoint on one side, a stack of faded paper status notes on the other, the paper visibly out of date.
MAY 29, 2026 development agents

Verify the Running System, Not Your Memory of It

I opened a session to fix an open loop that was already closed. The only thing that told me the truth was the live process, not my notes about it.

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A vast, gleaming automated factory floor full of robotic arms and conveyor belts stretching into the distance, with a single small cardboard box sitting alone at the end of the line.
MAY 28, 2026 building ai

I Built the Factory to Avoid the Work

I spent a full day building a system to dispatch work to AI agents. The work I was avoiding took fifteen minutes by hand. The factory was the avoidance.

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A woman leaning back in a wooden desk chair in a warm home office, eyes closed and exhaling, shoulders dropped. A laptop sits dimmed and half-ignored on the desk beside her.
MAY 27, 2026 ai coaching

Clients Aren't Buying AI. They're Buying Relief

I'm good at finding the issue and reaching for the fix, and the fix usually has tech in it. What I'm working on is the two things I skip on the way there: sitting in the pain, and painting what the work feels like once it's gone.

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A dim workshop interior at dusk. An interior wall is opened up to expose conduit, copper pipes, and bundled network cables routed halfway across the studs. A single clip-on trouble lamp casts warm amber light onto the unfinished wiring. A toolbag and coil of cable sit on the floor, work paused mid-task.
MAY 18, 2026 ai adoption

The 61-Point Gap

Most people in your company can use AI. Almost none of them do. That gap is not a tools problem. It is a bridge problem.

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A clean desk at dusk. One monitor centered on a paused frame. Stacked contact sheets pushed face-down to the side, one held upright in the foreground — the chosen one.
MAY 8, 2026 ai content

Taste Is the Bottleneck Now

AI can make more content than ever. The hard part is knowing what is worth publishing.

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An assembly line where work enters one end, splits into parallel stations sized to different workers, passes a single inspection gate, and ships out the far end.
MAY 7, 2026 ai agents

The AI Project Manager That Actually Saved Money

What I learned after rebuilding my PM agent into a multi-agent factory instead of another chat prompt.

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MAY 7, 2026 building shipping

Seven Months of Making It Better

I built something that worked and spent seven months improving it before telling anyone. Here's what I was actually doing.

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A gleaming polished building facade on top, held up by raw unfinished scaffolding and exposed plumbing below.
MAR 29, 2026 learning ai

The Reality of Agentic Infrastructure vs. Aspiration

Why the strategic gap in AI isn't the quality of the output, but the architecture orchestrating it.

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A CEO at the top of a ladder handing the lowest rungs of work, one by one, down to a glowing AI assistant.
MAR 28, 2026 dan martell ai

The CEO's AI Automation Playbook (And Why Consistency Still Wins)

Takeaways from Dan Martell's Elite Coaching Call on dedicating a decade to your craft and saving 10 hours a week with AI automation.

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4am selfie at my desk during a Dan Martell Elite coaching call, monitors, code, and commitment
MAR 13, 2026 mindset growth

The 10X Version of You

I joined Dan Martell's Elite program. Day two, and I already failed the homework.

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FEB 12, 2026 ai process

AI Is a Hammer (And You've Never Seen One Before)

What I learned teaching a nonprofit team how to actually use AI — not as a genie, but as a process.

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A robotic arm reading an architectural blueprint and building the exact structure drawn on it, beam for beam.
FEB 9, 2026 agents infrastructure

Documentation is Executable Infrastructure

I spent four hours on a 5,000-line guide no human will ever read. It was written for a machine to build from. That is the new job of documentation.

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A parent building a structured sparring gym so a young debater can practice, rep after rep.
FEB 3, 2026 building parenting

Building Cicero: Process Engineering for Domain-Specific Coaching

Leveraging process engineering to bridge the gap in domain expertise when supporting my son.

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A tended garden bed where the same plant appears three times along a row: a fresh seedling, a half-grown sapling, and a full leafy tree.
FEB 1, 2026 philosophy web

The Return to the Digital Garden

Why I am moving away from the 'Portfolio' and back to the 'Lab Notebook'.

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A glowing file tree of a software repository, but every folder and file is labeled with a business concept instead of code, read at a glance by a single figure.
JAN 25, 2026 tools workflow

IDE-Driven Strategy: Using Coding Agents for Business Ops

I gave a coding agent a repository with zero code in it. Just my business. It read the whole thing and started fixing it.

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A pair of hands joyfully squishing a lump of bright, colorful Play-Doh on a table, mid-experiment.
JAN 20, 2026 philosophy mindset

The Mindset of Play

We cannot be afraid of the tools that are reshaping our world.

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A machine reading a document at a desk while a taxi-style meter beside it ticks upward, charging for every word it reads.
JAN 15, 2026 aeo future

Writing for the Machine Audience

Why we need 'Surgical Precision' and zero fluff if we want AI to recommend us.

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A cutaway of a house showing the pipes behind the walls, glowing water running cleanly to every room.
JAN 10, 2026 systems strategy

Marketing Problems are Infrastructure Problems

Why throwing more content at a growth problem fails if the underlying data flow is broken.

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