I imagine the feelings I have about AI with respect to knowledge work are akin to the feelings trades people had when power tools arrived. Yes, it will put you out of business IF you don’t adapt.

With the advent of mass-market AI, virtually every person alive has the opportunity to multiply their impact on the world by several times. I’m trying my best, and I hope you are too.

If you dismiss absolutely every other positive feature of AI, its ability to empower people suffering from ADHD and similar conditions probably redeems everything negative about it.

I know there are problems with the metaphor, but fire is a good way to think about AI. It’s a fundamental, culture-transforming technology that empowers people to destroy or create. Without fire, so many horrible things would never have happened, as would so many great things.

Over the years I’ve tried to learn what I can about finance and economics. A word that gets thrown around is “arbitrage”, where you essentially buy something that one market thinks is cheap and sell it in another market that thinks it’s expensive. The AI tech today is offering a lot of arbitrage.

If you haven’t found a way to be optimistic about AI, I don’t think you’re trying.

If Democrats win the midterms, I will give every American $6000 from the same funds that Donald Trump is planning to use for his $5000 payment.

If Republicans win in November, you MIGHT get a weird $5K payoff from Donald Trump. If Democrats win, you MIGHT avoid the US devolving into an increasingly fascist state.

Another weird side-effect of AI: I believe that anybody who is getting really good at managing AI agents is also getting pretty good at managing people. At least if they bring humanity to the table as a baseline.

I continue to be in awe of how fast I can tear through issues when AI helps. If everybody in the world whose productive output benefits society used AI, I’m confident it would repay whatever costs there are.

Congrats to my friend @johnbrayton who just released a major update to Unread, his RSS reader for iOS and Mac! www.goldenhillsoftware.com/2026/09/u…

A reward for those Core Intuition fans who never removed the feed from their podcast app! Episode 27.1, including our reaction to the Apple announcements and some of the AI implications. coreint.org/2026/09/e…

We rewatched “9 to 5” starring Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dabney Coleman. Really ahead of its time and a great way to remember and celebrate Dolly. Amazingly, the director and co-screenwriter, Colin Higgins, was the writer and co-producer of Harold and Maude!

I threw some veggie taco meat on this pizza. It was good.

IMSO (In My Strident Opinion) you can choose to use AI to be more fake, or to be more real.

A really great, IMO irrefutably great, aspect of AI is that it can unstick your pursuit of progress in almost any field. I’m learning so much about everything because, if I get stuck, I can ask Claude or Codex or Gemini. To use a college metaphor, they are ubiquitous, always on-call TAs.

Imagine how bad the outage at Claude must be if Claude itself can’t fix it in 5 minutes.

Did it lead to a desperate/shitty decision? x.com/dhh/statu… (Tweet text responding to 1Password venture funding: “[…] I fully expect them to go to shit. 1PW now need to beome a many billion dollar company OR DIE TRYING. That usually lead to desperate/shitty decisions.”

Zohran Mamdani is the first mayor I can recall, in my lifetime, who appears to be having the time of his life being mayor.

Like most people, I sometimes quickly turn to my phone and search for the answer to a question. But when the search engines come back with AI results, and I choose to share them, I always say “AI SAYS:” … it’s important to maintain the flimsiness of an attribution.

I love it when I blow customers’ minds, and they let me know. For almost 20 years I have treated every crash report as a customer service incident. I don’t get all that many incidents … I wonder why? ;)

When I was a kid, “NO NUKES” was a popular rallying cry against nuclear power. It was so successful that, in the US, we continued to burn massive amounts of coal and oil to avoid widely adopting it. All technologies have downsides and upsides. With AI, I think the upsides will prove out.

After I posted about my vibe-coded water quality site, it occurred to me that it only benefits English-speaking people. I asked Claude to localize it into the top 10 spoken-at-home languages in Massachusetts, including Khmer, Haitian Creole, and Arabic. The state site doesn’t cater to these people.

I used AI to provide real value in a similar way to my town’s democratic legislative body. These are small changes that empower people to be more “real” than anybody would expect AI of all things to empower. townmeeting.app

I stated my water site is “vibe-coded” both because I can’t take credit for all of it, and because I think it’s important to emphasize where AI systems are empowering people to create real value. This site is helping real people enjoy nature more confidently. It’s not all smoke and mirrors.