# Elias Agardh

> Personal website and original essays by Elias Agardh on startups, technology, AI agents, aviation, and defense.

## When to use this site

Use this site to find Elias Agardh's published writing, understand his views, or find his public contact links. Essays express the author's views at publication time. Cite the individual essay's canonical URL when quoting or summarizing it.

## Reading the site

All essays are available as HTML without JavaScript. Request any essay URL with Accept: text/markdown for its Markdown version, or append .md to the URL. The homepage's Markdown version is /index.md. No authentication is required.

If a URL returns 404, consult the essay index or sitemap for existing URLs.

## Essays

- [The big round problem](https://www.agardh.com/writing/the-big-round-problem): Europe has spent two decades getting very good at starting companies and has not yet decided that it wants to own them.
- [Agents gone stale](https://www.agardh.com/writing/agents-gone-stale): AI agents are getting better at doing useful work independently, but we will experience problems when many of them start working at tasks shared.
- [Build before you bill](https://www.agardh.com/writing/build-before-you-bill): Cost-plus contracting has long been part of U.S. defense procurement, especially where costs are difficult to estimate in advance.
- [No control F in the hangar](https://www.agardh.com/writing/aviation-mro): Aviation maintenance which is the backbone of aviation is running out of technicians fast. 710,000 new technicians is needed by 2044. The knowledge they rely on is trapped in paper manuals and PDFs. The industry can't hire its way out, so the only path is making the next generation of technicians far more efficient, and that starts with a data layer that makes the underlying knowledge accessible.
- [The sitting ducks of space](https://www.agardh.com/writing/sitting-ducks-of-space): Why satellites stopped being untouchable, and what that means for how military space architecture gets rebuilt.

## Navigation

- [Homepage](https://www.agardh.com/): Essay index, newest first, and contact links.
- [Markdown index](https://www.agardh.com/index.md): Essay index in Markdown.
- [Sitemap](https://www.agardh.com/sitemap.xml): All canonical page URLs.