[ the journal ]

Notes on building the AI-native web.

Page 14 of 17

What actually makes a site fast in 2026

Not your framework. Five decisions account for nearly all of the difference between a fast site and a slow one.

Password resets and receipts that land in spam are indistinguishable from a broken product. The setup is mostly DNS and restraint.

It works on the demo is not the same as it works on a Tuesday when the person who built it is on holiday. A checklist.

You don’t need component documentation and a governance model. You need eight decisions written down where people will find them.

None of them is that the code is old. All of them are things the business can observe without reading a line of it.

The question assumes a trade-off that mostly doesn’t exist. Where it genuinely does, humans win — and here’s why that’s also the right AIEO call.

There is no position one in a synthesized answer. What to track instead, and how to tell real movement from noise.

Anything reachable from the internet will be probed, scraped and spammed. Four controls that handle most of it cheaply.

Keyword volume was a proxy for demand. With AI search you can go straight to the thing it was approximating: what buyers actually ask.

Serving another language is nearly free to switch on and quietly expensive to do responsibly. Four things that break.

Responsive layout solved the easy half a decade ago. The failures that remain are about touch, text and what you hid.

Public leaderboards measure something other than your workflow. Four questions that pick the right model for the job in front of you.