The archive
Writing
Essays, interactive explainers you can poke at, and the occasional launch. Anything marked Interactive has something to play with inside.
The World's Hardest Sudoku
I went camping and got in an argument about whether you ever need to guess at Sudoku. This page is my rebuttal.
Announcing: Call Roulette
Spin a wheel, call a friend.
Planet Wars
A Galcon-style real-time strategy game with a ladder of six AIs to beat, including a port of the 2010 Google AI Challenge winner.
Announcing: OnlyKaighns
In response to overwhelming demand for kaighn content, we're announcing the launch of OnlyKaighns — with newly acquired compute capacity to ease usage limits. Visit to view and subscribe.
Monopoly Was Rage Bait: The Case for Taxing Land
Monopoly was invented to make you hate landlords. It worked so well someone stole it, deleted the lesson, and got rich. Here's the lesson — Henry George, the Land Value Tax, and why we should tax land for what it could be.
Connect 4
Two Wolves: Alphas vs Betas in Connect 4
Kaighnbot - using claude code as open claw to manage my social life, annoy my friends, and profit!
I run Claude Code on a macbook in the corner of my apartment. It autoresponds to my texts, makes plans, proactively texts people to hang, and manages my calendar. No code. Glorious results. Mixed reactions.
MCP was a dumb protocol
A hater's history of MCP: how it won on local demos, got over-extrapolated to remote, and quietly lost the use case to plain APIs and a bash terminal.
How to count things that are too big to count
A build-up from counting on your fingers to permutations and combinations — with widgets you can poke. Why a 4-digit PIN has 10,000 options, why a lottery is hopeless, and why order is the whole ballgame.
I built a 50-year NYC housing simulator. Here's what I learned (mostly not what the simulator said).
A weekend project that became an excuse to learn housing economics. Don't cite this in policy debates. But the things I learned by building it changed my position on a few things.