I had rebuilt my I Ching website with AI, but I kept looking at it and feeling that something was slightly off. Visually, it looked good. Even as a designer, I couldn’t quite explain what wasn’t sitting right. I wanted to modernise the older site, republish the content and move from Jekyll to Astro, which I also wanted to explore. Ther...

After installing PostHog on my I Ching website, one of the things picked up very quickly was suspected rage clicking. When I watched the session replay, I could see people repeatedly clicking to reveal the lines of their hexagram. That was interesting, because clicking six times is how the consultation works. A hexagram is made up of s...

I finished recording a meeting during an early test of TapScribe. The audio was there, but the transcription spinner kept turning. The model the app needed was missing from the Mac. The interface still behaved as though transcription was underway, and it gave me no useful explanation of what to do next. The successful recording had rea...

An internal app for a service business had to answer an ordinary question. What was happening on each job, and who could see it? The work was specific. Supervisors used to-do lists, quality-control progress and project measurement sheets. The owner needed visibility across that work. After the build, he reported that the supervisors fo...

I compared two versions of the operating template I use when AI works inside one of my software projects. The earlier version already did many sensible things. It separated exploration from implementation, kept project state outside the conversation, and required evidence before work moved to Done. But the review exposed a quiet gap. A...

The transcription took three minutes. The real product work started after that. In one of the first real tests of TapScribe, an 80-minute meeting produced a usable transcript in about two to three minutes. The tester described the quality as decent and moved the result into his knowledge system. The AI had done its job. But the product...

When I built the AI Ching app, I wanted to preserve the quiet, unhurried quality of an I Ching consultation. The I Ching has never felt like something to rush through. You bring a real question, become quiet enough to notice what is moving beneath it, cast the hexagram, and then sit with what the reading reveals. That shaped practical ...

Someone with an idea can now build an interface, connect a database, add payments and put a working product in front of people. That is a real achievement. The fact that an experienced engineer was not needed for every early step is part of what makes this moment so interesting. The difficulty arrives when the visible product is ahead ...

I opened HEY in the terminal, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. There was something wonderfully refreshing about moving through email from the keyboard. The whole experience felt fast, focused and surprisingly pleasurable. It also fitted naturally into the way I was already working in Omarchy. The part that felt like a bigger ste...

I mapped how one of my own websites might help someone find a suitable beginner Tai Chi class and start an enquiry. For a person, that involves more than finding a form. They need to know where the class is held, whether it suits a beginner, what happens next and what information they are about to send. An agent could navigate the page...

A little jumping spider lives somewhere around my desk. Every so often, it appears on top of my screen, walks across the keyboard, or balances on one of the cables and looks at me. These visits interrupt my flow, and I have realised that is exactly what makes them helpful. For a moment, I stop being completely absorbed in whatever I am...

At the end of a workday, I closed the laptop and realised my shoulders had not finished working. Nothing dramatic had happened. The calls were over, the decisions made, and the room was quiet. But when I stood up, my shoulders were still lifted and my breath was sitting higher than usual, as if another request might arrive next. I noti...

A few people saying they would test something can make a product decision feel more certain than it is. I posted a simple demand test for a Mac recorder idea. At the time, it had reached 233 impressions and received five engagements. Two people commented, including someone expressing tester intent. That mattered. The problem was recogn...

What do you see? From a distance, many people see a red Coke can. Look closely and what looked like solid red resolves into cyan, black and white lines. The image did not change. Only your distance from it did. I find that a useful way to think about interpretation. Insults, success, failure, enemies, status and certainty can feel like...

A dashboard can make a team more informed while making the room less honest. The numbers go up on the screen. Someone starts explaining too early. Someone else goes quiet. Information intended to improve visibility can feel like a public sorting mechanism instead. I have seen the same thing in interface reviews. A screen can be technic...

An AI frontend can look finished long before it is actually usable. I keep seeing flows that render clean screens, polished components and credible copy, but the first keyboard pass breaks the illusion. Focus disappears. Labels do not connect. Error states are vague. The product looks ready in a screenshot and starts failing the moment...

The first time softness really made sense to me in Tai Chi was not as gentleness, but as information. If I stiffen in push hands, I lose the line of force almost immediately. If I stay soft enough to feel, direction becomes clearer, timing improves, and I do not need nearly as much effort to respond well. That changed how I notice work...

Some products feel rushed before anyone can point to a missing feature. You can see it in the review room. The file is tidy, the rationale is mostly there, and nobody is saying anything obviously reckless. But the pace has crept up. Feedback gets shorter. Someone says, “let’s just get this out”, because the team no longer has much room...

A friend once told me he wanted to vibe-code the next Airbnb. I understood the excitement. With AI and the right tools, listings, search, maps, bookings and payments can appear surprisingly quickly. The surface can arrive before the business has really been understood. But a marketplace is not only a checkout flow. Who holds the money ...

The week started leaking into every gap I left unguarded. A quick reply while the kettle boiled, one more message before walking inside, a half-read email just before bed. None of it looked dramatic, but by Wednesday I could feel the cost. My breath had crept higher into my chest. My shoulders stayed faintly prepared. Even when nothing...

Some products look clean and still make people tense. The interface is quiet on the surface, but using it does not feel calm. A screen may have plenty of white space, a restrained palette and very little clutter, yet something in the flow keeps asking for vigilance. The order is visual. The experience is not settling. I have seen spars...

A friend asked me what Tai Chi actually is, and why anyone would practise it. I said it was a form of meditation. I could see the moment his attention drifted. “Meditation.” That vague word that usually signals incense, sitting still, or something unnecessary for people who are busy dealing with real life. So instead of explaining Tai ...

When I talk to people about how they use AI, I often hear that their whole working process lives inside one tool. They have built up conversations, plans and a way of working that suits them. I usually ask what would happen if they lost access to that account. A friend of mine experienced exactly that. He had set up a whole process in ...

A few weeks ago, someone shared a video in a men’s group I belong to. It asked whether healing can become an identity of its own, a life spent preparing to live rather than living. The idea stayed with me. I could recognise the weariness behind it, the feeling that there is always another wound to uncover, another pattern to understand...

We have developed a habit of making beginnings visible almost as soon as they appear. A new idea becomes a post. A private change becomes an announcement. A project that has barely begun acquires a name, a promise and an audience before it has had enough contact with reality to know what it is. I understand the attraction. Sharing crea...

Most of us have seen the yin-yang symbol explained as two opposing forces held in balance. Light sits against darkness, good against evil, activity against rest. The wise person, in this version, learns to keep everything in the right proportion and remain somewhere near the middle. It is a neat explanation, but it has never quite matc...

I was sitting in my car with a thought I wanted to capture. I was safely stationary, but typing on a laptop in that setting was awkward enough that I could feel the thought starting to move away before I had written it down. I pressed the shortcut for FluidVoice, spoke naturally, and watched the words appear in a small heads-up display...

Chrome has a small feature on macOS that has irritated me for years. Press Command-Q to quit, as you would in almost any Mac application, and Chrome does not immediately obey. It asks you to hold the keys down for a long press. The feature is called Warn Before Quitting, although it does not really warn you. It delays you. In the Chrom...

An AI-generated screen can look remarkably convincing before anyone has established whether it belongs in the product. That is the uncomfortable part of the current design-to-code moment. A plausible interface is no longer expensive to produce. An agent can generate the right kind of layout, familiar controls, a sensible information hi...

I spent days trying to get a mature design system into an AI design tool. The problem was not the prompts. The system already existed. It had established tokens, layouts, navigation, forms, grids, interaction patterns, and components that had been refined through years of real product work. My goal seemed straightforward, give an AI to...