duran, alexis
n. — a working glossary of his terms: the subset of the ledger he wants remembered.
- Context /ˈkɒntɛkst/
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What AI coding is actually about. It compounds — so stop rebuilding it from scratch every session.
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The leverage was never “the AI writes code.” It’s that effort can stack — each pass inherits the last one’s context instead of starting cold.
Used well, it frees your attention for the interesting part: establishing non-obvious relationships between things, exploring, building — not re-explaining your codebase for the tenth time. Used badly, it goes sideways building from zero, every time.
- Craft /krɑːft/
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The willingness to redo the part nobody will ever scroll back to look at.
- Distribution /ˌdɪstrɪˈbjuːʃn/
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The 80% nobody warns you about. Building the app was the easy part.
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Shipped my first solo iOS app — a workout timer — on Jan 20, 2026, sure the hard part was behind me. It wasn’t.
Getting a good thing in front of the people who’d want it is a separate, harder craft than making it. I’d built plenty before, but never my own — and never had to make a stranger care.
see also: Production · Estimate
- Duran, Alexis n. proper
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Paid to write software. Compelled to speak. Talks too much; revises later. Reachable at hello@alexisduran.com.
- Estimate /ˈɛstɪmət/
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A lie told to a calendar.
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We estimate our own side projects as if we were a company — as if a team had already weighed the options and decided this was the right thing to build.
Solo, that machinery doesn’t exist. Building your own products demands far more than coding. The estimate is the smallest of your problems; knowing what’s worth building at all is the real one.
see also: Distribution · Craft
- Footgun /ˈfʊt.ɡʌn/
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A feature that makes the easy path the wrong one. Good engineers earn their reputation by avoiding them.
- Friendship /ˈfrɛn(d)ʃɪp/ · n.
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The wrong word for the right thing — a load-bearing rope you build to anything that can change you, in a material grade you earn, never choose.
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We call it friendship, but that’s the soft word. What we build is a rope — a load-bearing line to a person. Rope comes in grades, and as a kid all you’ve got is twine. It holds until the first real weight, then frays. You don’t get stronger material by wanting it; the universe issues it, and the price is always a challenge you’d rather have skipped.
So you can read someone’s age in their ropes. Grow wise enough and the material becomes spun steel — the cable that holds the bridges that don’t come down. You still can’t hand anyone the grade; that’s theirs to earn under load. But steel can take a strain twine can’t, so the stronger rope carries the weight while the other is still being tested. That’s the rare way a bond holds without both ends fraying for it at once.
The catch is readiness. Some people learn to build with what you bring; some never will, no matter how much of it you hand them. The last thing the rope teaches is which is which — and that knowing the difference isn’t the same as cutting the weak lines loose. You keep the twine. You just stop asking it to hold what it can’t.
- Kaizen /kaɪˈzɛn/ · n. [Japanese]
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Continuous improvement, taken personally: repeat something with intention long enough and it stops being something you do and becomes someone you are.
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A tourist asked the gardener at Eton College how he kept the lawns so perfect. “Easy,” he said. “Brush off the dew every morning, mow every other day, roll once a week.” “Is that all?” “Absolutely. Do that for 500 years and you’ll have a nice lawn, too.”
I keep the story for the patience. But the gardener undersells it. A lawn repeats to stay the same — a person repeats to become someone else. The things that once felt impossibly hard get brushed and mown and rolled until they’re simply what I do, and the days, spent with intention, compose into who I am. You don’t feel the becoming. One day you notice you’ve become.
- Libardo /liˈβaɾðo/ · n. proper
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The 'Libardo' in Libardo Alexis Duran Martinez — my real first name, the one only my parents use, and only when I'm in trouble.
see also: Duran, Alexis
- No es solo código n. proper
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A weekly retrospective podcast — a colleague and I thinking out loud about web programming, half to teach others, half to teach ourselves. 2019–2024.
- Ownership /ˈəʊnəʃɪp/
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The opposite of "the AI got it wrong." You shipped it. The model doesn't sign its name — you do.
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A model is a tool, and tools don’t carry blame. The moment “the AI did it” becomes an excuse, you’ve outsourced the one thing that was actually yours: judgment.
Use whatever gets you there faster. Just don’t pretend the output stops being yours because something else typed it first.
see also: Vibe coder · Context
- Production /prəˈdʌkʃn/
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The only environment that tells the truth. Your local bubble is a flatterer.
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You can manual-test inside your own assumptions forever and learn nothing. I shipped a Hyrox app on May 14, days before my own SOLO debut — and real users found what was fundamentally useless in an afternoon.
Not broken — useless. The things I’d assumed were enough to matter weren’t the ones that did, and no careful clicking in my own bubble would ever have told me. Take the leap, or stay comfortably wrong.
see also: Distribution · Context
- Rausch /ʁaʊ̯ʃ/ · n. [German]
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Nietzsche's name for the heightened state art comes out of — proof the philosophers were mapping peak performance a century before the psychologists arrived.
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I chase it on purpose, hardest in endurance sport. Sport isn’t only about health or aesthetics; it’s the most reliable place I know to meet my own weakness — which emotions I can endure, how I talk to myself under load, whether I can be my own partner when it stops being fun.
That self-knowledge doesn’t stay there. It shows up in a hard conversation with a manager, or the moment mid-argument you realize you were the one who was wrong.
see also: Tactical
- Shipping /ˈʃɪpɪŋ/
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The act that converts an opinion into evidence. Until then it's a draft of a belief.
see also: Distribution · Production
- Tactical /ˈtæktɪkl/ · adj.
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How you treat your time once you stop accepting "I don't have time" as a reason.
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“I don’t have time” and “I wish I could” are how people justify mediocrity to themselves. Plenty of people do far more than I do — the ceiling sits well above the social default.
The difference is rarely talent or hours in the day. It’s whether you spend them on purpose.
- Vibe coder /vʌɪb ˈkəʊdər/ · n.
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A scapegoat invented in 2025. The tools didn't lower the bar — they stopped hiding where yours already was.
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There have always been people who care about the work and people who ship whatever compiles. AI didn’t create that split; it removed the friction that used to disguise it.
The tooling isn’t the tell. Your process is.
No entries under that verb — yet.
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