Essays & field guides — on family, AI, and creativity. New writing arrives Sunday mornings.
Claude Code vs Cowork, asked in a client’s conference room. My instant answer was no, and I didn’t say it, because I wanted to test it rather than assert it. What each chair actually gives you, and why one of them may be the biggest advantage a knowledge worker can have right now.
Read the guide →

My officemates caught me talking out loud to a bot in a coffee shop. Homer, Cicero, and Milton would have understood.

I built my brand as a folder before I built a page of it. A new company’s folder failed four of seven checks.

Twenty-eight logos on a wall, my reactions on tape, and one sentence that became a rule.

My officemates caught me talking out loud to a bot in a coffee shop. Homer, Cicero, and Milton would have understood.

Dre said the quiet part out loud. Every tool we now call standard was cheating once.

What my son said in the dark, and what I’ve been carrying since. Not despair — appetite.

A rainy afternoon, a nephew, and the half of the optimism answer you collect yourself.

Nine paintings of our cafés and bars — and what they surprised me into seeing.

For her birthday, a picture of a garden that doesn’t exist yet — made from our own backyard.

Both are good and both belong in one layered strategy. Which layer does what, and why the top one is where a system gets better every month.

Never ask yourself what you want. Look at real things, record what you say, and let the machine write the rule.

Seven layers, one source of truth each, and a seven-question audit you can run on your own folder.

Everyone rates themselves a three out of five at AI. The gap to five is three habits, not a better prompt.

How I quit the timesheet and pointed AI at the trail my work leaves — the business, winning work, and my own writing, reconstructed.

One workhorse, a folder system full of context, and a human holding the taste gate.

The Wispr Flow voice setup — and how to dictate so a machine can build from it.

Five context layers, a loop harness, and the actual files I run every day.

How to diagnose whether yours is working, and six ways to improve it.

Stop thinking in isolated loops — wire the whole operation as a directed graph.

Four habits that work in any terminal, plus a free one-screen fleet dashboard.

Claude Code as the cockpit, Nano Banana for stills, Higgsfield for motion.

Three rules from a decade in newsrooms — and when grammar is just style.

Jessica Gutierrez navigates AI at Santa Monica High — divided task forces, distracted kids, real breakthroughs.

Keith Marcel Woods learned to design at eight, on a tablet with no memory — chasing one outcome ever since.

Munir Haddad turned childhood blackouts in wartime Lebanon into one conviction: tell your story.

Something surreal happened with the comic this week.

Everyone at this office is 100% human-made. The monitors disagree.

Everyone's talking about the AI wave. Almost nobody's talking about the boats. So I drew the boats, with an assist from Hokusai.
Subscribers read every essay first.
I write one essay a week — family, AI, and the ordinary week, looked at hard — and send it Sunday morning, before it’s on the site. This page is the second place it lands.
Thank you — you’re on the list. The next essay arrives Sunday morning.