AI, taste and the quality without a name
Can AI have taste? Christopher Alexander and Eugene Gendlin help explore felt experience, AI slop and products that fit the people who use them.
Your AI gives you the most-published take, not the best
Your AI defaults to the most-published, not the best. grounded-forge is my open-source answer: pick the sources you trust, project them onto your task once under audit, and let the assistant cite back to the source.
Come Prepared to Die: Your Paradigms Were Survivable. AI Makes Them Lethal.
The paradigms most organisations run on were survivable when machines couldn’t replace people. AI changes that. The essay that became the book.
Just This: a practitioner’s meditation
My Alētheia teacher offered a different frame in the middle of a hard week: not yes, not no, just this, whatever is actually facing me. A small distinction on the page, decisive in the body, and it turns out to be what Agile was pointing at all along.
An Open Letter to Stephen Wolfram and Spike Jonze
In 2017 I asked two people I admire to build a particular kind of machine. Working with Claude grounded in a 400-reference library, I now use something close to what I was asking for.
What a 106-year-old psychological law tells us about stress in the office
What changes when leaders ask people to work harder on complex tasks. A 2014 article, with a 2026 note on its limits.
The Three Most Important Aspects of a Successful Product
Delight, value, and doing some good in the world: the frame I still use for products and AI tools alike. The “do good” part has only grown more central as the stakes rise.
“Silent Lens” Wins Google Ideas challenge at the Google “Develop for Good” Global Hackathon
An app to help people document civil-importance events under hostile conditions, built for a Google hackathon. What I’d change today, and what the design got right about trust under adversarial pressure.