Tawanda Moyo

engineer & writer

Essays

Longer, a little more serious and thoughtful

A concrete look at brittle AI deployment in everyday systems — a retail chatbot that discusses anything, recommends rivals, and suggests litigation — and what it reveals about responsibility and design.

A deep dive into the user experience of the EcoCash app, focusing on the hidden costs and usability issues surrounding balance visibility.

Field notes from building an entire site by prompting alone — where the model shines, where it quietly goes wrong, and what the craft still demands of you.

What thinkers from Aristotle to the present expected of made minds, and how those old hopes and warnings read now that AGI is a research agenda rather than a myth.

A wasted afternoon debugging WordPress, and how an increasingly bloated web costs the people on the slowest phones and the slowest connections.

Notes

Books, philosophy, projects, fragments — thinking in public, less polished.

Three in the Morning books · Jul 2026

A short reflection on waiting, impatience, and a parable from the Zhuangzi.

What I am reading in April books · Apr 2025

Notes on implementing JavaScript features in Firefox: a useful bridge between web standards, browsers, and programming craft.

Knowledge and Property book quotes · Aug 2024
The Fate of Great Men book quotes · Aug 2024
Everyday a Festival Day book quotes · Aug 2024
A Loan That Cannot be Repaid book quotes · Aug 2024
Simplicity book quotes · Aug 2024
The Transformation of Things book quotes · Apr 2024
Eat like an Emperor book quotes · Apr 2024
Serendipity book quotes · Mar 2024
Envy book quotes · Jan 2024
Cleverness book quotes · Jan 2024
A Philosopher book quotes · Jan 2024
A Gentleman book quotes · Jan 2024
What I read in February books · Mar 2023
What I read in January books · Feb 2023
Good Design books · Jan 2023
Slow Down life · Aug 2022

Saving 436 posts by the late Alex Magaisa in case the domain lapsed. It did — the site is gone and the domain now belongs to someone else.

Contributing to OSS (Matrix) as a Newbie software-development · Jun 2022
Systems over goals life · Feb 2022

Published elsewhere

Published outside this site.

Anthropic ships a model under ASL-3 for the first time, and what a capability threshold looks like when a lab actually crosses one.

A chatbot starts talking about white genocide in South Africa unprompted — the case for African involvement in how these systems get governed.

Everything I have written for Techzim →

Implementation guides for a chat SDK, written as a technical writer — webhooks, contact lists, support chat, live comments.

Archive

Early dev logs and how-tos, kept for the record.