Dwarves Foundation memo
We write down what we build, break, and figure out.
Memo is the research site of Dwarves Foundation, a research-driven consulting firm. Every engagement leaves a record: what broke, how it was caught, what it cost. The public half is here.
577 notes, 13 topics, 32 case studies, since 2016
Now
Start here
Chosen by the editors- Guest writers on memo, keyed by the writer's own domainReports, 10 Oct 2026
- Designing Out SNAP FraudWriting, 9 Oct 2026
- Five layers to tune before you fork your agentWriting, 8 Oct 2026
- DeepSeek harness, dissectedWriting, 18 Aug 2026
- What stays valuable when anyone can build anythingWriting, 14 Aug 2026
- Modernizing complex financial systems through systematic transitionCase studies, 9 Jul 2025
Activity
Memos published, last 12 months69memos published on 15 daysBusiest day: 34 memos
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Oct 2025 to Oct 2026. Hover or tap a day to see its notes.Less More
Desks
Four places we write fromEngineering
Craftsman knowledge
- 21 Oct 2026Related notes by meaning: an embedding index won memo's Ask and lost the chat eval
- 18 Oct 2026Five sources made 72% of our 5,068 pages: six months of a Worker that watches our jobs
- 18 Oct 2026How trust works at Dwarves: from your team to the people we call first
- 18 Oct 2026MBTI preferences and cognitive functions, reading notes on My True Type
AI
Pushing human limits
- 18 Oct 20263,016 delegations to agents: the long briefs cost the most
- 18 Oct 2026Harness engineering notes from a team running agents all day
- 18 Sep 2026Dispatch #2: handoff pattern: từ ảnh chụp app đến Figma và video demo
- 7 Sep 2026What the Engelberg report got right about us
Case studies
Client work, documented
- 7 Jul 2025AI-powered consulting sprints for rapid clarity
- 1 Jul 2025Building a scalable social listening data pipeline
- 31 Mar 2025AI for fast and fair talent search
- 9 Dec 2024Neutronpay: Lightning Network payment solutions
Consulting
Field notes from the practice
- 18 Oct 2026#5 Building is cheap now, getting heard is the hard part
- 8 Sep 2025Social proof
- 1 Jul 2025Attack their cash cow
- 22 Jun 2025You can poke life
Notes from people who were here, in their own words.
- 22 Oct 2026No. 43: Tuan Dao on delegating to AI
- 26 Sep 2024No. 42: Dat Nguyen on hybrid learning
- 19 Feb 2024No. 41: Duyen Tran on the Techie project
- 18 Oct 2026WALA 5 parts
- 10 Oct 2026Harness engineering 9 parts
- 18 Sep 2026Dispatch 2 parts
Latest
Everything else, newest first- Ahrens on the slip box, from atomic notes to writing from the bottom up
- History of DeFi
- Onboarding without flattening: what 9T keeps hard on purpose
- Play a quarter, wait the rest: the dead-air problem in turn-based artillery games
- The 2025 roadmap, scored: 22 promises, 5 kept, 9 dropped
- The Go bet worked, then we tried to double the team
- The Hook Model and AARRR: reading notes on Nir Eyal's Hooked
- Twenty accounts and the rich players: the economy loop behind farm-and-fight MMOs
- Waterfall, iterative or Agile: how to choose a software lifecycle for a project
- We called ten technology arcs in June 2025. eight of the 60 experiments we planned got built.
- We stopped testing engineers on speed
- Engineering release checklists for production, UAT and frontend UI
- Memo, rebuilt: Elixir and DuckDB out, Cloudflare and D1 in
- Dispatch #1: UI kit workflow: bốn bước từ setup đến implement
- Hide the MacBook notch: the 32-point fix for the macOS 27 menu bar
- Record a Discord talk on your own machine
- Claude Code 2.1.259 turned our Read() deny rules into a Bash tripwire
- The debug loop: make the agent measure the browser before it touches the CSS
- A landscape of UX research methods
- A scene has large-scale and small-scale structures