Co-founder of Japan's first philosophy consultancy.
CEO of a tech company.
Currently writing from Tokyo.
Cross Philosophies (2017) · ENVLOP (2020)
Field notes from ENVLOP, a small studio that runs on AI leverage — its own products and a few client builds. The log is the work itself; the essays are where I try to work out what it means to live and work this way.
Writing
An operator's field note: the deliberation I use for running things ran, uninvited, on a desk purchase — through leg grades, timber species, finish types, and a two-centimeter difference between two nearly identical models. The machinery of judgment has no sense of scale; it runs at one intensity whatever the stakes. What stopped it was not discipline but arithmetic.
An operator's honest report: I run a studio by turning everything into a system, and I tried to run my own steadiness the same way. Every system I built to produce it — deleted apps, router blocks, stacked timers — made it worse; what worked was tearing them down. Subtraction, applied to the inner life.
The system that finally got me publishing was subtractive: instrument the real work, publish its trace automatically, and keep the self out of the loop. If publishing feels like a stage, the move is not to perform better — it is to build the thing so no performance is needed.
The system I built to keep my performing self out of the studio's writing worked — and then kept going: it started removing the judging self too. A system that summarizes your work is deciding what the work meant; the smoother it runs, the less you notice the deciding leaving the room. An honest report from inside that problem, without a solution.
Every document about your operation starts drifting from reality the moment it is written, because the work moves and the description does not. The fix is not discipline but architecture: keep almost no representations, regenerate them from the version history on demand, and hand-write only intent — in the present tense, with the past deleted. Running the studio with an AI agent made this non-optional: an agent believes what it reads.
I built the standard AI infrastructure — routing, retries, evaluation, orchestration — and deleted all of it within a year, because the model outgrew the scaffolding. In a domain improving this fast, infrastructure is a depreciating bet against the thing it sits on: build as little as the capability allows, and delete the moment it allows less.
A year of running a studio produced more deletion than construction — close to a fifth of every change was a removal, including whole products. When AI makes adding nearly free, the scarce skill moves to subtraction: judging what not to add, and what, having added, to take back out.
Japan's largest corporations pay for philosophy — and what they are buying is not ideas but a capacity their own institutions are built without: sanctioned room to hold a question open before converting it into a project. Nine years inside the category that grew into that gap, and a hypothesis about why the scarcity is sharpest in Japan.