What I'm up to now

Feeling anti-cynical

Using language models and agents every day has made the world feel less fixed. Not to ignore the hard questions and fears (job loss, energy consumption), but because so many stuck places become movable: a question I can answer better, an idea I can test sooner, a thing I can make or repair without waiting. The experience has felt practical, and also wonderful.

It feels like a return to the late-90s internet, when technology and the world were full of possibility, before twenty-plus years of scale, fragmentation, and specialization made everything feel more fixed.

Maybe the simplest way to say it is that I feel less cynical than I expected to. A lot of the conversation around "AI" assumes the world we have now is fixed, and these tools are going to crash into it. But I think people are dynamic, malleable, and surprising. They adapt. Markets adapt. The world adapts. I'm adapting, too.

Building in loops

At RelationalAI, I'm building Rel with my amazing team of four. The work sits right in the middle of what has my attention lately: how teams free business knowledge, customer needs, and day-to-day decisions from people's heads, random docs, and meetings, and compose it into shared context that people and agents can use.

It has also changed how I work. I still think of myself as a product and design person, but lately I can move much more easily into code, demos, testing, and deep support questions. Work that used to require a handoff (or simply get skipped) is suddenly something I take end-to-end.

I'm retooling every two weeks, which is exhausting and even jarring at times, but a process is the mold a product gets stamped from. It's worth the attention.

Dinner outside

The patio work has paid off in the best possible way: family dinners under the open sky in our little lower-patio stadium. Everyone seems more at ease out there. We talk more easily. We have more fun. It was worth it.

We're also getting ready for a family trip to France: Paris, countryside, north coast, and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend real time with family there.

The patio's quiet origin story.

Reading, making, following

I'm making a story with my daughter on walks. We record pieces as we go, then turn them into character sheets, setting sheets, and little artifacts from the world. I love it.

Most weekends, my son and I drive up Highway 1 to explore new coastal trails and beaches and chase his obsession: cars. It has become one of my favorite recurring rituals.

I'm finally reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Enough time has passed that I can feel the sadness without letting it block the admiration. I'm glad to have his worldview back in my head.

Also following the NBA closely, as ever. The playoffs have been a blast, and I recently launched 10 Feet High, a little basketball site for NBA player data.

This is my now page: a small, timestamped answer to what has my attention these days. I recommend one.