These essays were written across three years, in airports, cafés, hotel rooms, and one football stadium. They were not written to be a book. They became one in retrospect, when I noticed the same questions surfacing in different clothes.

The question underneath all of them: how do we pay attention to the right things? Technology automates it. Travel disrupts it. Startups consume it. Philosophy interrogates it. Football demands it for ninety minutes.

The building runs alongside the writing. I co-created OneThread, project management software for teams, and later AgencyHandy, a system for client workflows built to reduce friction without removing judgment.

More recently the work has moved toward guardrails for AI systems. NoBurn and baar-core block expensive LLM agent calls before they execute, and ApiDiffGuard catches breaking API changes before they reach production.

I do not have a better answer to the attention question. But I find it worth asking every time.

Written by Robat Das Orvi. You can find me on X and GitHub, or read the chapters.