When we talk about whether something or (ugh) someone is "technical" do we actually mean "computational"?

Deep gratitude to this crew for the chance to talk my book in this kind, insightful space #monkigras

It's early on a cold, sunny Saturday morning, and I have a contribution to the "can an AI be conscious and have feelings?" debate: the strong empathy I have for this recycling bin that partied too hard last night, and is undebatably conscious of that fact right now

The relationship is the product

Let’s do more of THIS

No one paved a path for me into tech, so I got to watch the paths other people took, learning how chaotic and emergent they actually were This, it turns out, is why the complexity of large technical ecosystems is pretty comfortable for me

Great day for going ham on my drum machine

Okay but now that we've made computing systems that can make clusters of words and simulate human reasoning, what are we as humans doing to stay grounded and sane through this? 🤔 Because dawg we like to think we're pure cognition but our human reality is also physical, emotional, and biological

New project day 😀

This one was such a treat I've been adamant for years that yes, there may be defaults to how LLM-powered tools are designed, but we don't have to accept the wrong constraints We can McGyver these things into shapes that serve human-centered goals

My love language is remembering whether you use Spotify or Apple Music and sending you tracks on the right platform

the reality that your users have an inner world and your product's impact on it influences your success is hella inconvenient so

Okay but have we talked about how codebases were some of the last really rich online communities and them being flooded with AI-generated code presents an enormous sense of loss…?

Now entering the stage of conference talk prep where I'm wondering just what it is I've put myself up to WE ARE SO BACK BABY!

I love New York, the city I was raised in, for more reasons than I can count but one of those is that every second of every day is living, experiential proof the world contains multitudes So many things are true at once

I’ve watched people do it Accelerated iteration without judgment and oversight is a massive liability We’re likely entering an era where the meta skills of changing gears in one day—from running agents to discerning if they’ve done the right thing for users—are what we have to practice

A lot of the SREs in my life sure think so. This fwiw is why I’m so interested in instigating human collaboration around agent output (i.e. the pair prompting sessions I’ve been facilitating). Shared human sense-making of agent output is absolutely necessary to get durable org-level results

It should be faster to stop killing people than to stop feeding them.

The practices @simonwillison.net is spotlighting here are fascinating, but this bit grabbed me (see screenshot) Using new methodologies to do QA and affirm user stories is great, but that doesn’t mean you’re building a product people want Only talking to humans will confirm that

I’ve done research with EMs and PMs where one or more members of the dev team is heavily using agent coding tools, sometimes 10xing the lines of code produced in a week. Can confirm code review is the biggest quandary

Btw, I think calling it “crafting” instead of “hacking” is such a delightful subversion Willing to bet that’s a big part of why we got such a varied group

Perhaps it’s time to balance out the distilled dose of present-day SF, with its many beauties and horrors, by revisiting Joan Didion’s Where I Was From

This was a joy yesterday, I'm still buzzing from it! A non-exhaustive list of cool things that happened (anonymized, of course): - folks from many experience levels showed up - we talked about our feelings, and we all felt pretty anxious and overwhelmed in this moment - we got to crafting

2 different people today told me how lonely and in need of connection everyone is right now

Tfw you show up in SF to run a very different kind of AI event and a lot of people are ready for something different 🤔

Pro tip: only maintain friendships with people your childhood self would have felt safe and happy with

Every child is everyone's responsibility www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Petition to rename Large Language Models to Gestalt Slurpers

Dear fellow humans of the Northern Hemisphere, If you look outside at 4:35pm, there’s a good chance it’s no longer pitch black. We’re really doing it y’all!

Them, fifteen years ago: “Give her a community manager job. She’ll serve beer at conferences. It’ll be great.” Me: “I will reverse engineer the basis of human motivation and knowledge-sharing in computing contexts from first principles.“

Also I think a bunch about how the lone genius frame of software convinces us this is the only way to succeed, so everyone is jamming their brain around trying to do the impossible in isolation, when a social frame means we can actually scaffold what each other knows

Sue has made me so much smarter about this era of tech. Excited that everyone else gets to benefit now too!

How much trouble is made and gotten into online because some very personal (and real!) subjective phenomena that lives inside one person is assumed to be generalizable, and they go around in circles trying to force that schema onto other people, getting mad at others when it doesn’t work?

Because here’s the thing: we become dedicated to software tools that give us results. And once a tool has delivered enough superpowers, there’s a sort of escape velocity to how we regard them. Everything else that shows up needs to compete with the wins you’re already busy racking up

Working with Claude Code the other day, I was reflecting on how defensible their position is. And I think they’ve made a strong one for themselves by serving a developer constituency incredibly well.

It’s so important to understand this

This is truth incarnate, and I despise it

Bombast and assuredness are rewarded in tech culture, but one of the fastest ways for someone to gain my trust is to say “I don’t know” Like, give me gradations of certainty over feigned bravado any damn day

There are so many awful externalities we have to deal with from LLMs but more people being able to to build software can be hugely democratizing if we craft products to help users learn to work with the code they produce.

“Bad tooling as a cause and function of bad culture”

*me, driving* Ah yes, just going to take a moment to be attuned to the other scared, squishy little meat ghosts hiding inside of 1 ton rolling metal death machines so that none of us does anything too stupid.

Anyone want to go do a Friday night before Christmas Costco run just to feel something?

Okay but super weird question How much of the terseness we encourage in software development was encoded in earlier days of computing when “computer user” was a tiny, specialized group?

Expanding the definition of “developer” as you go is the biggest dev tools growth move there is Most folks would rather code harder than figure out how to play that game

Shoutout to that time at a Stack Overflow offsite an engineer stood up and said: “There’s no politics here. We just look at the data and decide.” Grade A telling on yourself. Such an efficient way to transmit that politics are on your side.

This is inconvenient information, but there is not one kind of AI/ML technology that only does the good use cases and a different kind of AI/ML that only does the bad use cases

Some speaker joy as we look back at 2025 and plan for public speaking in 2026! My inbox is now open for '26 events that need empathy + evidence + psychology for technologists 👀

I’ve had seniors in my life ask me to explain real quick why voting with our feet doesn’t work the same with FB or Amazon And since none of them have been able to bankroll me spending ~5 years dissecting networked capitalism I have to share what I can in tiny pockets and send them on their way 😔