Essays & notes
Writing
Selected essays about AI, systems, craft, and the work of making things that hold up. The faster public record lives in Field Notes; projects keep their own evidence trails.
Field Notes
Short observations, build receipts, and useful edge cases from active work.
Evidence trailsResearch & projects
Longer investigations, technical artifacts, playable systems, and project context.
Season archiveCompetitions
Summer and Spring Into AI live where their submissions, scoring, and outcomes can be understood together.
Selected essays
Substack Writing: At 100 posts in
A reflective checkpoint on what a hundred published pieces reveals about cadence, public practice, and keeping a human voice in the loop.
Writing · Advisory Hour · Summer Into AI · Jul 7, 2026Saturday Plays: Ride for Liberty (Week2)
A Saturday Plays reflection on Jake Strait’s Week 2 Ride for Liberty submission, pseudo-3D game feel, particles, and attention.
Writing · Visual AI Field Note · Jun 23, 2026Sometimes AI is so wrong, it’s art.
A gallery of broken, strange, and unexpectedly beautiful AI-generated worldbuilding errors from a 1995 mall and virtual-city experiment.
Writing · Craft Exercise · Human Voice · Jun 19, 2026Writing Exercise: Palimpsest
A human-only writing exercise for learning the history of a word, resisting average AI voice, and putting palimpsest to work.
Writing · Agentic AI · Codex /goal · Jun 14, 2026Visibility approach into Codex /goal
A field essay on making long-running Codex /goal work observable with proof-tracker websites, screenshots, links, and verification surfaces.
Writing · Visual AI Field Note · Jun 13, 2026Bug in the scene
A compact rainy-city image receipt about one tiny artifact that punctures the generated scene and makes the pipeline visible.
Writing · Visual AI Field Note · Jun 12, 2026This is a 60fps+ city scene I’m working on
A compact generated-city receipt about motion, AI weirdness, and the brief moments where a dense scene starts to feel artful.
Writing · Agentic AI · OpenClaw · Jun 12, 2026First time I’ve had Codex give me a response like this.
A short Codex field note from the moment an agent offered to move explanations into a local browser UI with mockups and diagrams.
Writing · Visual AI Field Note · Jun 11, 2026The sliding picture frame isn’t freaky at all
A compact generated-video receipt about a nearly ordinary room, a sliding picture frame, and why background-object state matters.
Writing · Hermes · Jun 7, 2026Hermes Kanban slays your ticketing system
A first-party field essay on Hermes Kanban, triage, agent-native workflow, and why Jira-era ticketing feels increasingly antique.
Writing · Craft · Jun 3, 2026Craft of Writing; Sailing the Sea
From raft to galleon: learning writing craft through Ursula Le Guin, Zelda, and the tools that move you across the water.
Writing · Craft Note · Jun 1, 2026Don’t make the mistake of assuming a concise voice is needed
A compact craft reminder that concise is not the only valid AI-writing voice; rhythm and sentence shape still matter.
Writing · EverQuest 1999 · May 31, 20261999 EQTS: Building Debug Tools
Rethinking UI generation by using AI to build specific debugging tools for retro software archaeology and game-scene inspection.
Writing · Field Note · Spring into AI · Mar 7, 2026After four challenging weeks… a winner will soon be chosen!
A short scoreboard signal from the point where the Spring into AI sprint turned from weekly shipping into final judging.
Writing · Field Note · Spring into AI · Mar 1, 2026Evan’s submission makes use of a new technique
A Week 3 note around Evan’s Kraken Memory-Smash submission and the technique-transfer signal behind it.
Writing · Field Note · Spring into AI · Feb 25, 2026First submission in for Week 3: a mind palace builder
The first Interactive Tutorials receipt: an AI-powered Method of Loci app that turns memory practice into a guided experience.
Writing · AI Learning Note · Feb 27, 2026What happens when you can build an app that personalizes learning?
A short Advisory Hour note on LinkLevel, Kyle Sebeysten’s gamified AI learning app, and turning any article into a playable first level.
Writing · Visual AI Field Note · May 9, 2026What’s crazy isn’t how wrong this image is
A visual field note about an image that is interesting less for being wrong than for the workflow around it.
Writing · Sprite Field Note · May 5, 2026Experiment in sprite generation failed
A sprite-generation experiment that failed as tooling but succeeded as a strange visual artifact.
Writing · Local AI Field Note · Mar 31, 2026I need to solve on-prem AI before I have to mortgage the house
A one-line local-AI economics note: solve on-prem before the cloud bill becomes a mortgage payment.
Writing · Agentic AI · OpenClaw · Mar 25, 2026Getting a message from my AI agent about the new base model
A short note from the sci-fi overlap of an agent training a model while the human turns screws into a physical Clawbot.
Writing · Robots Field Note · Mar 19, 2026The robots of GTC2026
A compact visual note from GTC2026, where robots feel less like a distant demo and more like the next interface layer.
Writing · Agentic AI Note · Feb 22, 2026Deleting code with a simple snap of the fingers
A quick pointer to an agentic-code cleanup idea: deleting code with intention instead of panic.
Writing · Advisory Hour Note · Apr 10, 2026You know you’re in a deep rabbit hole
A short note from the edge of an agentic build where the next action sounds like fictional compiler lore.
Writing · Visualization Note · May 29, 2026Pathfinding and NPC placement visualization
A compact visual note from an active AI-world experiment: movement, placement, and the moment a generated space starts to become inspectable.
Writing · Craft · May 28, 2026On letting AI do the writing
A reflection on treating writing like a muscle, and why using AI well still depends on practicing clarity for yourself.
Writing · Architecture Note · May 26, 2026Large software architecture change across service boundaries
A short project note on moving layers and tiers around service boundaries while keeping tests as the safety rail.
Writing · Visual AI Notes · May 10, 2026The automated first-person-view switch is holding up
A short field note on first-person continuity in a generated grocery-store image sequence.
Writing · Agentic AI · May 10, 2026Sent one of agents to recreate a little magic
A short field note on sending an agent to recreate decades-old game-engine magic in TypeScript from the ground up.
Writing · Substack note · May 10, 2026I started posting more regularly. 90day stats are slightly up.
A quick public-loop check-in on posting rhythm, 90-day Substack stats, and the small signals that show up when a habit becomes visible.
Writing · AI & Understanding · May 20, 2026This one's for the mind, that one's for the machine.
Why formless AI knowledge blobs are not the same thing as understanding, and why the mind still needs edge work.
Writing · Robots · May 17, 2026While waiting on Codex limits to reset, back to building robots it is.
A short bench note on a WIP Picar-X robot, NanoPi on-board control, and a Jetson-class “system2 big brain” driver plan.
Writing · Image Note · May 18, 2026Image-only note: wet street at night
A cinematic visual note: rain-slick asphalt, orange streetlights, and a lone white coupe moving through a city corner.
Writing · Games & Browser Experiments · May 14, 2026I’ll be writing on EverQuest 1999 for a few days.
A short field note on old virtual worlds, browser-native lenses, and the odd places a research thread starts.
Writing · Agentic AI · May 13, 2026The end of the home office?
How agentic AI changed the meaning of the home office, and why the human part of the work can move back into the world.
Writing · Visual AI Prompt Note · May 12, 2026gpt-image-2 prompt: Picture of a rock in a forest
A compact prompt receipt testing ordinary subject matter through vintage Helios lens character, film grain, and shallow depth of field.
Writing · Agentic AI · May 12, 2026Codex still working
A short field note from day three of a long-running Codex task, with the agent still methodically pursuing the goal.
Writing · Agentic AI · May 11, 2026Can’t believe this is still running. Codex is a BEAST.
A short public receipt from the moment long-running Codex work started feeling less like a chat and more like durable infrastructure.
Writing · Agentic AI · May 2, 2026Maintenance of model providers, default reasoning providers, model speed defaults
A short note on provider drift, reasoning defaults, model-speed choices, and why agentic systems need a caretaker layer.
Writing · AI Economics · Apr 28, 2026Why more intelligence doesn’t automatically mean more money
A short Advisory Hour note on token maxing, output volume, and why AI work has to convert into economic value.
Writing · AI Image Notes · Apr 27, 2026This is still evolving at a fast clip.
A short note on ChatGPT image generation, character form, and what happens when style references become compressed observations.
Writing · OpenClaw Systems · Apr 21, 2026Upcoming weekend project idea: a smallNN powers the puppets
A short build note on embodied avatars, tiny neural controllers, and a layered OpenClaw world bridge architecture.
Writing · AI Tools · Apr 12, 2026OpenAI’s Codex should have elasticity on your message caps for bad weather days
A short note on tool limits, weather, and momentum in the daily rhythm of AI-assisted work.
Writing · Agentic AI · Apr 12, 2026Took dog for a walk and came back to a prefab studio builder
A short note on returning from a dog walk to an AI-built tileset prefab editor, and the weird compression of weekend-scale work.
Writing · Experiment Journal · Mar 11, 2026Journal of chatting with 5.4 as it unpacks a binary from 26 years ago.
A long-form experiment journal following an AI model as it unpacks a decades-old DOS binary from one file outward.
Writing · Personal Essay · Feb 17, 2026A mere human wrote this, part 1
A breakfast-table essay on the novelty of typing with human fingers while agentic work keeps finishing elsewhere.
Writing · Spring into AI Note · Feb 10, 2026Congratulations to Myles Strait for putting up the first points
A quick scoreboard note from the moment Myles put the first Spring into AI points on the board in record time.