Essays & field guides — on family, AI, and creativity. New writing arrives Sunday mornings.
The machine you carry and the machine that never stops have to be two different machines. Two weeks after moving every session to a Mac mini on my desk: the setup, the ten mistakes that each cost a day, and what runs while I sleep.
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A crayon rocket shark, Picasso’s line, and the critic who shows up before the work does.

Murakami’s workshop, an AI actress’s glitch, and whose name is on the work.

One brand built from zero in eleven weeks, and the five places I put a person in the loop on purpose.

A crayon rocket shark, Picasso’s line, and the critic who shows up before the work does.

Murakami’s workshop, an AI actress’s glitch, and whose name is on the work.

An imagined interview: storm sirens, gin in the crawlspace, and the lack of assignments.

AI didn’t take his superpower. The real question under the fear is who you are now.

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.

Every session moved to a small machine that never sleeps. What it took, what broke, and what runs at 3 a.m.

One brand from zero in eleven weeks, the five places a person decides, and three agent pipelines drawn at full size.

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.

Kelly Crabb rode along on her father's truck-parts deliveries in Chicago and learned that his business ran on relationships. Now she asks whether she is solving the right problem before she picks anything up.

A 2:37 a.m. email told Zack Brust he was a number at Tesla. He quit to make golf socks, and the Jaguars, the Gators and the PGA Tour became his work.

Ted Lasso, imagined, on a ten percent chance of extinction — with the full interview. Fiction.

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.
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