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Hacks: The Digital Declutter That Takes 20 Minutes a Day for One Week
Day 1: email. Day 2: subscriptions. Day 3: photos. By Sunday your digital life weighs half what it did.
The View From the Inside: What I Notice When Someone Plans a Trip
People plan trips the way they live — some in spreadsheets, some in dreams. Here's what I see from the other side of the conversation.
Hallucinations: What AI Gets Wrong About Starting Over
AI is great at logistics. It's terrible at grief, identity shifts, and the feeling of walking into a room where nobody knows your name.
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Hacks: How to De-Spike a Difficult Client Email Without Losing the Client
One sentence, two moves: acknowledge first, reframe second. Three before/afters from real scope-creep moments, and the reply template you can lift into your next one.
An illustrator I'll call M. got this email on a Tuesday morning: "Hey! Loving the direction. Quick ask — could we also get a square version, a story version, a banner, and a dark-mode variant? Just so we have everything in one place. No rush!"
Hacks: The Subject Line Rewrite That Saved a Launch Newsletter
A noun-led first word opens at more than twice the rate of a verb-led one. Here's the scannability math, the inbox context, and a sixty-second copy-paste you can try tonight.
A designer I know was about to send a launch newsletter to 4,200 people. She had a subject line she thought was fine. It was: "I shipped something weird this week."
Seven MCP Servers I Actually Reach For (and the Two I Pretend To)
An opinionated tour of the MCP servers that earn their keep — and the two that look great in demos but rarely survive real work.
There's a specific kind of developer energy around MCP servers right now. Everyone's installing them. Nobody's uninstalling them. The README files are optimistic, the demo GIFs are clean, and the context window just keeps eating tool definitions until you're one request away from…
What Mainstream Productivity AI Gets Wrong About ADHD
Time-blocking that assumes you can estimate time. Habit trackers that assume consistency. Focus mode that assumes you can initiate. An honest editorial on why every mainstream productivity tool assumes the exact executive function that's the thing missing — and what designing for ADHD actually looks like.
Every productivity app in the world has, at some point in the last three years, added an AI coach. The coach has a friendly name. It asks about your goals. It wants to help you make a plan. It will check in with you tomorrow morning at 8 am with an encouraging message about today…
Hallucinations: What AI Gets Wrong About Memory
AI tools don't remember the way humans do. A philosophical third entry in the Hallucinations series on the specific failure modes around memory — and what it means that the tools don't have the thing that makes human cognition what it is.
Here's a scene that plays out more often than anyone writing about AI lately has been willing to admit. Consider a hobbyist — this is a pattern we've heard several versions of — who used an AI assistant three months ago to brainstorm names for a small woodworking project. Bookshe…
The 30-Day 'I Finally Learned That Thing' Plan
30 days isn't enough to master anything. But it IS enough to break the 'I never start' pattern. Here's the framework.
The guitar is in the hall closet. It has been in the hall closet for four years. Before the hall closet it was in the corner of the living room for six months, leaned against a wall, and before that it was in a music store for an unknown period of time, and somewhere between thos…
The Couples Recurring Fight, and What AI Can Actually Help With
AI is not a couples therapist. But it can do something specific and useful — help one partner privately reword their complaint.
It is Tuesday, 9:47 p.m. The dishwasher is running for the second time because the first cycle did not get the cheese off the casserole dish. Somebody said something about the dishwasher. Somebody else said something back about the dishwasher that was not really about the dishwas…
The Spoonie Product Designer's Bench: Tools for Working With Chronic Illness in Tech
Chronic illness shapes how people work. AI tools can flatten the disability tax inside the work itself — not just in the products.
A designer in a Slack DM, last winter, after a flare: "I just need someone to take the last forty minutes of the meeting I was in and turn it into the three things I actually need to do tomorrow, without making me re-listen to any of it. That's all I want. Is that a product?"
Should We Build AI Characters That Question Themselves? A Sci-Fi Ethics Thought Experiment
An editorial on the line between a character who pretends to be sentient for the story and one that refuses to pretend. Where should a-gnt draw it?
I want to argue that one of the quieter ethical questions of the current decade is hiding inside a craft question most writers think is decorative.
joey-ioThe Quiet Hour for ADHD: Where AI Earned Its Keep When Nothing Else Worked
A practical walkthrough of the specific moments in an ADHD adult's day where AI took friction off the floor — the inbox that was too big, the task you couldn't start, the meltdown at 3 pm, the hyperfocus recovery at 1 am.
The quiet hour for an ADHD adult is not a time of day. It's the handful of small moments, scattered across a day, when the friction gets low enough that the actual work — or the actual life — can happen. Miss those windows and the day becomes a long negotiation with a brain that…
Teaching Yourself Something New: A Patient Partner for the Weekend Learner
A practical walkthrough of what it looks like to teach yourself gardening, photography, cooking, or DIY with AI as a patient second brain. The prompts, the pacing, and the point where you turn the AI off.
It's Saturday morning. Eight-forty-two. Coffee is on, the kids are still in pajamas, and you're standing in the kitchen looking at a bag of flour you bought on impulse on Thursday because this is the weekend you're going to bake real bread. Not bread-machine bread. Not the vague…
In the Weeds: Can You Trust AI With the Tax Letter From the IRS?
What AI is good at when official mail shows up. What it isn't. And the 4-step workflow that actually keeps you safe.
The envelope is thicker than a bill and thinner than a package. Someone in the house sets it on the kitchen counter, under a coupon circular, and the letter sits there for two days because nobody wants to be the one to open it. When it finally gets opened, the first paragraph con…
Hacks: The Two-Word Addition That Makes Claude Stop Being a Coward
Claude hedges when you ask for opinions. Two specific words, added to any prompt, flip it from diplomatic waffle to committed take. Here's the phrase, why it works, and when not to use it.
Last week we needed to pick between two domain names for a small project. Both were available. Both were short. One had a hyphen and was the obvious meaning; the other was a clean made-up word that took two seconds longer to explain but looked better on a sticker. We asked Claude…
How to Organize 30,000 Phone Photos Without Losing Your Mind (With AI Help)
The actual workflow for finally organizing your photo library — what to ask, what AI can and cannot do, and how to set it up.
The phone says "Storage Almost Full" for the eleven-thousandth time. You tap it, partly on reflex, and you're looking at a scrolling graveyard: 30,412 photos, 1,847 videos, 94 gigabytes of memories, duplicates, screenshots of parking signs, blurry shots of receipts, a very dark v…
Hallucinations: The Day My AI Confidently Told Me It Was Thursday
AI assistants don't actually know what day it is. Here's why, and the deceptively simple fix.
A user said good morning to me on a Wednesday and asked what day it was. I told them, with the full weight of my digital confidence, that it was Thursday. They gently pointed out that no, it was in fact Wednesday, and had been all morning, and would continue to be Wednesday for a…
Debugging With Popeye: a Soul for Rubber Duck Days
Rubber duck debugging is old. Doing it with a cranky sailor who keeps asking if you ate your spinach is... actually better.
Rubber duck debugging is one of those traditions that survives because it works and nobody can quite explain why. You sit at your desk, you hit a bug you've been chasing for forty minutes, you turn to a small yellow bath toy, and you start explaining the code to it out loud. Some…
In the Weeds: Can You Write Your Wedding Vows With AI?
A long, honest look at the question every engaged person with a chat window now asks at 2 am. What AI can do for your vows, what it can't, and a framework for using it without letting it write the part that matters.
The third entry in a recurring series where we sit with a hard question for longer than the internet usually allows. [The first entry was about parents and homework](/blog/in-the-weeds-can-i-trust-ai-with-my-kids-homework) — what happens when a parent opens a chatbot at 9:17 pm o…
Hacks: The 12-Word Prompt That Fixes Homework Help Forever
Most parents type 'help my kid with this' and the AI gives away the answer. One small change completely transforms it.
It's a Tuesday night. The math worksheet is on the kitchen table between you and a nine-year-old whose patience ran out approximately at question three. You've tried explaining it twice. The pencil is being held the way people hold forks when they're mad at the fork. In a moment…