https://markmhendrickson.com/ Essays on user-owned agent memory, personal infrastructure, and building systems that restore sovereignty in an age of AI, crypto, and complexity. en-US Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/neotoma-openclaw-plugin/ OpenClaw stores memory in markdown files. Neotoma v0.4.3 plugs in natively as a structured state layer underneath, giving OpenClaw agents provenance, entity resolution, and versioned history without replacing the agent. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/neotoma-openclaw-plugin/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-markdown-memory-ceiling/ Three independent AI agent platforms worth billions converged on plain text files for memory. The convergence validates the problem. The failure modes they share define what comes next. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-markdown-memory-ceiling/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/when-agents-share-state-everything-breaks/ Most teams bolt agent memory onto whatever database they already have. It works until two agents write to the same store. Then one bad write propagates at machine speed, triggering downstream actions before any human can intervene. The industry is heading toward a trust crisis that retrieval optimization won't fix. Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/when-agents-share-state-everything-breaks/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/your-agent-harness-owns-context-not-truth/ Sarah Wooders argues memory is the harness. She's right about context management. She's wrong that context is the whole problem. Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/your-agent-harness-owns-context-not-truth/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agent-memory-breaks-before-retrieval/ BEAM tests retrieval at 10 million tokens. State integrity degrades at 500K. The two failure modes activate at different scales, and nobody benchmarks the earlier one. Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agent-memory-breaks-before-retrieval/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/no-ai-memory-benchmark-tests-what-actually-breaks/ The metrics that drive adoption in AI memory are almost all retrieval metrics. Good retrieval is necessary. No widely used benchmark tests what happens to stored data after agents write to it. Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/no-ai-memory-benchmark-tests-what-actually-breaks/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/customer-research-through-agents/ Eighteen human product evaluators ran the same evaluation prompt through their AI tools. The writeups were sharper than any call. That feedback reshaped the product’s positioning — and then its acquisition flow. The homepage now asks agents to evaluate, not humans to sign up. Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/customer-research-through-agents/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/eleven-releases-in-five-weeks/ I shipped eleven Neotoma releases in the first five weeks after the developer release. The CLI now works on other machines, unblocking onboarding. The MCP server is stable enough for daily agent use. The database can survive operator mistakes. Here is what changed and why. Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/eleven-releases-in-five-weeks/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/personalized-customer-research-with-agents/ About eighteen of twenty-six people I reached ran the same evaluation prompt through their AI tools. The writeups were sharper than any call. That feedback reshaped the product’s positioning — and then its acquisition flow. The homepage now asks agents to evaluate, not humans to sign up. Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/personalized-customer-research-with-agents/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/what-the-technology-asks-of-you/ The debate over AI maps onto a question the Enlightenment never resolved. Rousseau said tools corrupt us. Condorcet said they perfect us. Nietzsche said both miss the point. Technology is a test of character, and the only honest answer is what you become in the encounter. Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/what-the-technology-asks-of-you/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/how-i-lost-and-recovered-6000-memories/ I accidentally overwrote my production Neotoma database and dropped from 6,174 observations to 84. I got nearly all of it back. The recovery worked because Neotoma's architecture stores observations as an append-only log and recomputes entity state from that log. Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/how-i-lost-and-recovered-6000-memories/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/chasing-narratives-into-dead-ends/ Narrative FOMO followed me from crypto to AI. At Leather, the Ordinals rush felt like real demand. At Neotoma, every memory-related tweet triggers the same scramble. I've lived both ways a narrative can break your product. Borrowed signal has a term limit. Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/chasing-narratives-into-dead-ends/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/ai-skepticism-is-really-about-faith-in-humans/ The people who embrace AI encounter its problems more directly than anyone. But they also have the most faith that humans can work through them. The real skepticism isn't about the machines. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/ai-skepticism-is-really-about-faith-in-humans/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/neotoma-site-overhaul-developer-feedback/ I overhauled the Neotoma site. The old single-page wall of text is now a visual presentation backed by documentation, tool-specific integration guides, and architecture deep dives—driven by what testers said and where they got stuck during the developer release. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/neotoma-site-overhaul-developer-feedback/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/six-agentic-trends-betting-on/ The structural pressures that underpin my work, and what would invalidate them as the AI industry evolves. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/six-agentic-trends-betting-on/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-diary-and-the-dance/ Creation, whether a startup or a blog post, is a continuous habit of revealing your inner world and tuning into what comes back. The MVP is a continuum. So is everything else. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-diary-and-the-dance/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/when-the-chain-becomes-the-product/ I joined Blockstack in 2018 for the off-chain developer tools. Over seven years I watched token economics reshape the product direction, push the perceived moment of value perpetually into the future, and replace empirical product development with narrative-driven roadmaps. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/when-the-chain-becomes-the-product/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/your-ai-remembers-your-vibe-but-not-your-work/ Claude and ChatGPT now offer memory for free, but what they store are profile snippets, not the details of what you actually worked on. My testing showed stale exports, one-shot access, and platform-gated portability. That is why I am building a truth layer underneath. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/your-ai-remembers-your-vibe-but-not-your-work/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/what-my-agentic-stack-actually-does/ I built an agentic stack to dogfood Neotoma and accelerate my work. A private monorepo with 12+ MCP servers where I cowork with AI agents daily. Neotoma provides the structured memory underneath, letting agents build on prior work across every session. Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/what-my-agentic-stack-actually-does/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/always-on-memory-agents-and-the-truth-layer/ A new open-source memory agent from Google ditches vector databases for LLM consolidation, trading determinism for active pattern discovery. It makes opposite architectural choices from a truth layer on every axis. The strongest architecture may combine both: consolidation above, deterministic state you can audit and revert below. Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/always-on-memory-agents-and-the-truth-layer/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/neotoma-developer-release/ Structured agent memory you can inspect, replay, and trust. Open-source, local-first, available via npm for ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor. Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/neotoma-developer-release/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agent-memory-truth-problem/ Retrieval fits coding and is cheap; it breaks on completeness, consistency, and provenance. Why convergence to structured state is hard, and how Neotoma is designed for it. Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agent-memory-truth-problem/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agent-command-centers-source-of-truth/ Command centers for agents need a single, durable state layer for tasks and visibility. The UI is the dashboard; the layer it reads and writes is the substrate. Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agent-command-centers-source-of-truth/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/we-are-all-centaurs-now/ The humanness isn't in typing every word. It's in deciding what's worth saying. Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/we-are-all-centaurs-now/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agentic-wallets-mcp-bitcoin/ The future of crypto wallets is agentic. Wallets that expose execution surfaces let agents monitor, reason, and execute within policy while you keep sovereignty and approve only what exceeds your limits. Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agentic-wallets-mcp-bitcoin/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/why-agent-memory-needs-more-than-rag/ Retrieval for agent memory should be driven by structure, not similarity. Learned hierarchies beat RAG but are brittle. Schema-first design gives the same advantage without putting the LLM in the critical path. Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/why-agent-memory-needs-more-than-rag/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/building-structural-barriers/ You don't protect it through secrecy or patents. You build something they structurally can't pursue. Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/building-structural-barriers/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agentic-search-and-the-truth-layer/ Your AI finds things. It also misses things, overwrites them, and often can't say where an answer came from. Why that happens and what would fix it. Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/agentic-search-and-the-truth-layer/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/barcelona-guest-floor/ Your own floor in the heart of Barcelona. Quiet street in Gràcia, kitchen, king bed, rooftop terrace. Welcoming to all. Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/barcelona-guest-floor/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/openclaw-and-the-truth-layer/ OpenClaw runs on your machine, clears your inbox, and builds skills. The gap is memory you can verify, query, and fix. A truth layer under it gives you provenance, rollback, and the same result every time you ask. Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/openclaw-and-the-truth-layer/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/truth-layer-agent-memory/ Agent memory is forgetful. Why I'm building inspectable, structured memory for trustworthy agentic systems. Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/truth-layer-agent-memory/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/professional-mission/ Building sovereign systems at the intersection of crypto and AI Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/professional-mission/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-flip-side/ I've been reading The Flip Side since October and find it's an incredibly effective and efficient way to encounter and digest thoughtful opinions... Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-flip-side/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/yc-w19-web-developer-contract/ Web developers: The founder of a YC W19 company I know is looking to contract immediately for a project involving React, Node, and MongoDB with... Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/yc-w19-web-developer-contract/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/facebook-police-state/ Should Facebook really be responsible for policing the misuse of user datahttps://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/forensic-audits-cambridge-analytica/... Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/facebook-police-state/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/finding-flow-beyond-distraction/ One my highest priorities over the past several years has been to establish a more frequent state of flowhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowpsychology... Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/finding-flow-beyond-distraction/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/alps-snowboarding-recommendations/ Any recommendations on the best snowboarding destinations in the Alps with easy access from Barcelona and London? 🏂 Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/alps-snowboarding-recommendations/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-outline/ This is the most impressive media website I've seen in a while, from a creative design and construction quality point of view:... Sun, 10 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-outline/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/tutor-catala/ Algú coneix a un tutor de català bo? Estic buscant un per a fer classes d'una hora i mitja a La Dreta per els matis de dimarts i dijous abans de la... Sun, 10 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/tutor-catala/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/foursquare-swarm-checkins-sync/ Neotoma now backs up all of my Foursquare / Swarm check-ins to my Dropbox account whereupon they're republished instantly to my website on a new check-ins page. Mon, 13 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/foursquare-swarm-checkins-sync/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/sync-server-dropbox-api-version-2-fix/ As part of my working sprint at IndieWebCamp Berlin today, I managed to fix a show-stopping bug that's been in production for sync-server on Neotoma and run a backup job for my latest Foursquare / Swarm check-ins. Sun, 05 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/sync-server-dropbox-api-version-2-fix/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/dropbox-website-publishing/ My website's content is now populated automatically via Dropbox using Neotoma personal server and publishing software, reducing the friction to publishing, keeping data in sync, and paving the way for content aggregation. Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/dropbox-website-publishing/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/park-ranger-grunt-hoist-proxy/ While working more or less full-time on Neotoma since last summer, I've created a few repositories that are hopefully useful as modules to other Node.js apps in general. Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/park-ranger-grunt-hoist-proxy/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/touch-bar-autosuggest/ "Hmmm what I've been doing is that I wanted to be a good friend to my life and my life is so far away" - My Touch Bar autosuggest Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/touch-bar-autosuggest/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/spanish-non-lucrative-residence-visa/ Just over a year ago, I moved to Barcelona in Spain to live abroad for the first time. I booked a flight from San Francisco with little else in terms of preparation, an intentionally rash decision to experience what it would be like to land in a new country and improvise the establishment of a life there. Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/spanish-non-lucrative-residence-visa/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/bringing-it-all-back-home/ > "Now, I been in jail when all my mail showed, that a man can't give his address out to bad company" - Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie Last summer... Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/bringing-it-all-back-home/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/11-reasons-why-i-wont-click-on-your-link-bait/ 1. It blatantly panders to my predispositions. 2. I presume it was written by an underpaid intern. 3. I already saw the content on Reddit. 4. I'm... Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/11-reasons-why-i-wont-click-on-your-link-bait/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/kanban/ One of the most important aspects of product design and management is prioritization. There are only so many resources at a company's disposal at any... Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/kanban/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/success-projection-for-startups/ Startups often get so consumed by their day-to-day challenges that they do a poor job actually projecting their longer-term success or lack thereof.... Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/success-projection-for-startups/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/three-types-of-design/ People tend to use the word "design" very loosely when talking about product, but it's actually quite important to distinguish between the types of... Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/three-types-of-design/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-postmvp-fork-in-the-road/ A lot of startups rightly aim to release a minimum viable product MVP as their first initiative. The goal of an MVP helps a team rally around a... Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-postmvp-fork-in-the-road/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/does-your-product-provide-instant-gratification/ Over the past year, and mostly as a result of my Plancast post-mortem, I've spoken with dozens of entrepreneurs who are working on events-related... Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/does-your-product-provide-instant-gratification/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/a-postmortem-for-plancast/ Why Plancast never scaled beyond early adopters: sharing frequency, consumption patterns, incentives, and the difficulties of events as a content type. Originally published on TechCrunch, January 2012. Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/a-postmortem-for-plancast/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/share-frequency/ When designing a social network that depends on users to contribute content from which they'll collectively derive value, one must consider certain... Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/share-frequency/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/homesteading-on-the-indie-web/ I had the pleasure of attending IndieWebCamphttp://indiewebcamp.com/ in Portland last month, a BarCamp-style conference where techies get together to... Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/homesteading-on-the-indie-web/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/content/ People are particular about the forms of communication they employ when expressing themselves, through social networks or any other media, because... Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/content/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/relationship/ When people connect with others on a given social network, they are conscientious about whom they will connect with, because an exchange of... Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/relationship/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/three-pillars/ Social networking is a precondition for new modes of information exchange, not an end in and of itself. By definition, a social network is simply a... Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/three-pillars/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/how-to-pitch-a-tech-blogger/ I've been asked privately quite a few times over the last couple of years how one should pitch their startup to a tech blog like... Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/how-to-pitch-a-tech-blogger/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/some-latenight-ideas-for-blippy/ I feel a certain kinship towards the founders of Blippyhttp://blippy.com/. Not because I know them well I've met Philip Kaplan aka Pud only once but... Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/some-latenight-ideas-for-blippy/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/plancast-in-public-beta/ I'm happy to announce that the site I've been working on for the past half year or so - Plancasthttp://plancast.com/ - is now available in public... Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/plancast-in-public-beta/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/facebooks-social-graph/ The social graph on Facebook has been the company's biggest asset, but over time it has become perhaps its biggest liability as well. When users want... Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/facebooks-social-graph/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/worldly-developments/ I'm happy to announce some exciting news regarding my startup. I've officially incorporated as Worldly Developmentshttp://worldlydevelopments.com/... Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/worldly-developments/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-web-needs-its-own-app-store/ I've been thinking a bit about the Apple App Store recently, perhaps because I'm starting to think more about developing a mobile application that... Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-web-needs-its-own-app-store/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/narrowing-scope/ Since my last post, I've narrowed the scope of my project down a great deal. The main reason was to make it more accessible to first-time users who... Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/narrowing-scope/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-unfolding-legacy-of-twitter-for-software-design/ The immense amount of ink spilled for Twitter these days signals two main things. First, that web innovation in general is going through a... Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/the-unfolding-legacy-of-twitter-for-software-design/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/my-first-week-as-an-entrepreneur/ Today marks the completion of my first week working on my first startup/getting-the-lay-of-the-land. So, I thought it would be a good time to share... Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/my-first-week-as-an-entrepreneur/ https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/getting-the-lay-of-the-land/ As Erick Schonfeld was kind enough to announce in a post on TechCrunch last week, I've left my position at TechCrunch to build and run my own startup. Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT https://markmhendrickson.com/posts/getting-the-lay-of-the-land/