The Library

The Org Chart Is Mostly Software Now

September was a hiring month: a Marketing Agent, a new Superagent build, Parfait for the studio's memory, Lab Helper still in the builder. A one-person studio whose org chart is mostly software.

159 Emails

A month of real school year hit the app that reads my kids' school emails: 63 messages became 159, including a marching shoe payment reminder. The least exciting app I've built is the one in daily use.

The Newsroom That Writes 200 Articles and Publishes 10

My automated investigative pipeline wrote 188 new articles in six weeks and published almost none of them. The 184 unpublished approved pieces aren't a backlog — they're an editorial bar.

Names Are Load-Bearing

Five apps got new names this month. The renames aren't rebranding — they're the moment working titles die and products get born. You can date an app's maturity by when its joke name dies.

The Last Mile

When the pipeline becomes a storefront — and the AI-generated data follows the photo all the way to the sale.

The Studio as Software

What happens when your creative practice lives in code — and the studio becomes a system that gets better every time you use it.

The Multiplicity Problem

Why you're different people to different audiences, and why that's okay — the case for managed multiplicity.

The Proposal That Writes Itself (Almost)

What happens when AI meets the RFP — the gap between creative work and business development that most firms never close.

The Camera That Watches You Work

How a webcam, a five-second timer, and 359 frames changed how I think about process.

Where the Data Actually Gets Made

A photo synced from Drive doesn't just create a photo record — it creates forty-four fields that four unrelated systems read without any of them needing their own integration. Here's the architecture, and where else the same shape could run.

Tools That Don't Make the Art

The AI art tools that matter are the ones nobody funded — the ones that support the creative process instead of replacing it with a microwave dinner.

The Data Dance

How AI turns a Google Drive full of raw photos into a fully searchable, filterable, SEO-optimized storefront — thirty data points at a time, from a single enrichment pass.

The Cost of Calling Twice

The refactor that cut a photography pipeline's token cost by 10× — and the five lessons that apply to any system where AI handles data at scale.

The Activation Energy

Why the hardest part of making something is starting — and how AI eliminates the friction between wanting to create and actually creating.

The Studio Assistant Who Never Sleeps

How AI handles the invisible infrastructure of creative work — the metadata, the organization, the documentation — so the artist can spend their time making instead of managing.

The Expanded Vocabulary

How AI gives artists access to colors, patterns, references, and relationships they wouldn't have found on their own — and why the expanded vocabulary is a menu, not a mandate.

The Process Is the Product

How technology changes what we value about creative work — and why the making of matters more than the made in a world where AI can produce finished objects in seconds.

The Collaborator's Dilemma

Where does the human end and the AI begin? The ethics and aesthetics of creative collaboration with machines — and why the answer is a spectrum, not a binary.

The Unorthodox Path

The synthesis: the future of creative arts isn't AI-generated or hand-made — it's the intersection where both are required. Five principles for the unorthodox path, and a claim that the AI age will produce more human creative work than any previous era.

Photographers Don't Fight the Light

A backlit iris bud in the garden taught me something I keep applying to strategy: when a problem has no acceptable solution inside the framing you started with, the answer almost always lives at a different angle, not behind a more clever argument.

Excavating, Not Building

I loaded a canvas board with no plan — palette knives, oil pastel, magenta and teal and olive-dark — just pushing paint around until a face surfaced on its own. The decision wasn't to make a portrait. The decision was to stop interrupting the one that was already there.

Building in Public: The Case for Creative Transparency

What happens when you share your process before the product is polished? More than you'd think.

Why Systems Thinking Is a Creative Superpower

Most people think systems-thinking is for engineers. They're wrong. It's the most underrated creative tool in the toolkit.

The Happy Accident: How Curiosity Becomes a Skill You Can Train

Making Crystals Sing: A Deep Dive Into Quartz, Frequency, and Piezoelectricity

I have buckets of quartz crystal rough from a mine in Arkansas and a lot of questions. What started as curiosity about crystal properties turned into a full research session on piezoelectricity, resonant frequency, and whether you can actually make crystals glow using a function generator and a granite tile.

Making Crystals Sing: A Deep Dive Into Quartz, Frequency, and Piezoelectricity

What started as curiosity about a bucket of Arkansas quartz rough turned into a deep research dive into piezoelectricity, resonant frequency, and whether you can actually make crystals flash light by striking them together.

Getting the Most Out of Gamma Imagine: Tips, Tricks, and How to Use It Well

Gamma just launched Gamma Imagine — and honestly, the timing is interesting. The AI image generation space is crowded, but Gamma is betting that its differentiator isn't the images themselves, it's where those images live.

Behind the Build: How We Made the Creatorverse Orb

What started as 'can we add a cool galaxy animation' turned into something we think is genuinely unlike anything else on the web. Here's how it actually got built.

Maker Monday: Build, Ship, Repeat (Mar 10 - Mar 16, 2026)

Apps actively worked on: 4 (Desktop Tracer, Focus Journal, Mosaica, AIronot). This week was about committing to the 'one studio, many faces' idea by actually behaving like it in how I spent time.

From Vision to Canvas: How I Built a Tool to Bridge the Gap

There's this specific kind of creative frustration that I think every artist knows. You have a clear picture in your head — vivid, detailed, exactly right — and then you sit down to make it real and the gap between what's in your mind and what ends up on the surface is just... enormous.