The Zine.

Field notes from inside the work. Long-form writing on cognitive load, drift, and the future of MEP project management.

Vol. 1 • Active
Tom the cat holding a fork and knife, ready for a meal
// Feature

The tech industry thinks you are dinner.

By Matthew Smith • May 17, 2026 • 6 min read

Sub-$100M shops are about to have their insurance company tell them what tech to use. The logic behind sequencing, load calculations, and trade coordination has been refined over thousands of years. Construction should be driving this. Not riding in the back seat. And definitely not on the menu.

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Recent

The information overload we're not talking about.

Every meaningful advancement in the MEP trades has been met with resistance. PVC solvent cement was going to ruin plumbing. ProPress couldn't be trusted. BIM was a distraction. There is another burden building on projects right now, and we are not measuring it.

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Own your shop's intelligence. Or die.

Three months running Gemma 4:31B locally on a Jetson AGX Orin 64GB, tied into Supabase, image analysis, web, and Telegram. The side project turned into the future. The companies that build internal AI memory first are going to have a massive advantage.

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Bits of Data: how Harlan Charles thinks about cognitive load.

It's 1:47 PM Pacific. There's a piece of equipment that needs to be ordered today, not tomorrow. Every PM in the MEP trades has lived some version of this day. What nobody in this industry has done is count it. SDE → DRV → ADS → CC, a framework for the load no one is measuring.

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