Field Notes

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Engineering insights on Xperience by Kentico, AI-driven development, and agent commerce
8 of 34 articles

Field notes from production work: Xperience by Kentico architecture, AI-assisted engineering with Claude Code, and commerce built for AI agents.

The Other Softwar: Economic Cost as an Access Primitive at the Application Layer cryptography
May 18, 2026 - Mike Rahel

The Other Softwar: Economic Cost as an Access Primitive at the Application Layer

Lightning Enable's pitch is "monetize your API." But L402 does something deeper: it turns a payment into a cryptographic proof of economic cost, makin...

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L402 Broke at the Worst Possible Moment. Here's What We Learned. lightning network
Mar 19, 2026 - Mike Rahel

L402 Broke at the Worst Possible Moment. Here's What We Learned.

During a live demo for Lightning Labs, our L402 payment flow failed and ate 50,270 sats. The post-mortem revealed a fundamental gap in the L402 protoc...

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The Internet Has an AI Spam Problem. Bitcoin Proof-of-Work Is the Original Solution. authentication
Feb 15, 2026 - Mike Rahel

The Internet Has an AI Spam Problem. Bitcoin Proof-of-Work Is the Original Solution.

How L402 paywalls turn the economics of spam against the spammers — and why this was always the point of proof-of-work.

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An AI Agent Just Bought a T-Shirt. Now a Community Is Designing Them. Here's Why Both Matter. cryptography
Feb 10, 2026 - Mike Rahel

An AI Agent Just Bought a T-Shirt. Now a Community Is Designing Them. Here's Why Both Matter.

An AI agent just bought a physical product using Lightning. That moment exists because HTTP status code 402 — Payment Required — has been waiting for ...

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When Robots Have Money e-commerce
Feb 02, 2026 - Mike Rahel

When Robots Have Money

A future where humans stopped thinking about payments

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What It Means to Build a Primitive enterprise web development
Jan 20, 2026 - Mike Rahel

What It Means to Build a Primitive

This line of thinking is what led us to build Lightning Enable.

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Why Lightning is the Future of Payments e-commerce
Jan 13, 2026 - Mike Rahel

Why Lightning is the Future of Payments

The convergence of energy, money, and artificial intelligence has created a new payment paradigm. Bitcoin's Lightning Network sits at the center of it...

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When Bitcoin Meets Enterprise Security: WS-Federation Through a crypto(graphy) Lens authentication
Dec 18, 2025 - Mike Rahel

When Bitcoin Meets Enterprise Security: WS-Federation Through a crypto(graphy) Lens

You know that moment when you're troubleshooting authentication errors at 2 AM and suddenly realize you've been thinking about certificates all wrong?...

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