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Field notes1 essayLatest May 29, 2026● Personal · time-stamped

Field Notes

Notes from Cal.

Field notes from building Niche, agent-native product design, and what the editorial intelligence layer looks like in 2026. Time-stamped takes from the founder.

BylineCal AndersonFounder, Niche
postdrome/10 · closed-laptop-desk-lamp

Desk lamp, closed laptop. Calm before the next note lands.

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Latest

metaphors/241 · megaphone-tipped-over
May 29, 2026

Founder essay

Why I'm building Niche for creators and agents

Hey, Cal here. I've been thinking a lot lately about how agents are changing the way I build software. Not in the abstract “AI is going to change everything” way. Very practically. The way I work today is already different from how I worked a year ago.

~8 minute read · Includes JSON examples from a real Niche runRead essay →
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On the desk

What Cal is actively thinking about right now. Turns the surface from a static archive into a living desk between essays.

  • 01Auto-top-up caps for autonomous agent budgets — how do you let an agent spend without letting it run away.
  • 02MCP discoverability vs traditional SEO — the .well-known + agent-skills surface as the new sitemap.xml.
  • 03The fact-check verifier as a hard publish gate, not a soft warning.
  • 04Brand profile schemas as agent-discoverable contracts, not free-text prompts.
  • 05The right shape of pricing for credit-based agent-driven workflows.

About this surface

Reference content lives at /learn. Founder essays live here.

The split is intentional. The AI landscape will look different in twelve months; founder opinions written today carry their date so readers can weigh them in context. Reference content does not carry a date because the date is irrelevant to the meaning.