Why I'm Building This

Writing as a way to learn

I got into product because I love building. Software was the medium that made the most sense to me: you could take an idea, shape it into something useful, and put it in front of far more people than you could reach on your own. Product gave me a practical way to work on that kind of building without being the person writing every line of code.

That interest in technology started before product. I have always been drawn to new tools and shifts in how people use them, and I credit my first product role partly to my interest in mobile. In the late 2000s, I had a blog about it. It was not a grand strategy or a polished personal brand. I was just interested, and writing helped me organize what I was learning so the knowledge could actually stick.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing. But I kept building.

AI pulled me back in

Over the last couple of years, AI has slowly, then all at once, pulled me back into that feeling of being deeply interested in technology again. In 2024 and 2025, I worked on a prompt library, built a few GPTs, and made small tools to help me move faster and improve the quality of my work. Nothing too dramatic. Mostly practical things that helped me do my job better.

Then in January, I heard about OpenClaw. What fascinated me was not only the tool itself, but the stories around it: people training agents, going to bed, and waking up to something new that had been built while they slept. I knew OpenClaw was not going to become the default system for every use case. There were obvious limitations. But it made something much easier to see: agents were going to change how knowledge work gets done.

Around the same time, I went through a phase of trying to vibe-code apps with tools like Replit and Lovable. I could see the appeal, but I did not have a great experience. Too often I felt like I was chewing through credits while the tool fixed bugs it had created itself. They were also still too restrictive or too focused for the way I actually work.

Claude Code and Codex felt different. They overlapped much more naturally with my day-to-day work: reading, structuring, editing, debugging, automating, and turning messy intent into something more usable. Fortunately, I was able to get access to both in my role at EA, which meant I could start applying what I was learning to real work. I could build workflows, test ideas, automate repeated tasks, and develop skills that made me more effective.

Building more directly

For the first time in 14 or 15 years of building product, I can make things much more directly on my own. That does not make designers or engineers any less valuable. It means ideas can move faster, cost less to test, and become real enough to learn from sooner. I can build with agents, tools, skills, plug-ins, and the workflows this community is openly sharing.

That is what makes this moment so exciting to me. The technology is moving quickly, but the more interesting part is how much learning is happening in the open. People are sharing what works, what breaks, what saves time, what produces junk, and what changes the way they think. There is a lot of value out there for anyone willing to study it, try it, and adapt it to their own work. I also understand how overwhelming it can be. The pace is relentless, and the flow of hype, updates, demos, and opinions makes it hard to know what is actually worth paying attention to.

I do not know exactly what the future looks like for my role, or for other people's jobs. I do not think anyone does. But I know fear is not a very useful learning strategy. There is a lot of negative and scary framing around AI, job losses, layoffs, and the future of work. Some of those concerns are real, but I do not want fear to become the main way people relate to this technology.

For me, the answer is to learn by doing. Every time I take on a new task, I ask: how could I do this with AI? When I do something for the first time, I want to understand the workflow, improve it, and see whether it can be repeated next time with less effort and higher quality. That mindset is starting to change how I approach almost everything.

Why this site exists

That is why I built this site. It is a place to write, build, reflect, and keep track of what I am learning. The site itself is part of the experiment: I built it from scratch using some of the tools, techniques, and skills I have been learning so far.

I want to use this as a public learning loop. Some of that will be working notes. Some of it will be projects. Some of it will be prompts, workflows, and toolkit items. The point is not to pretend I have everything figured out. The point is to make the learning visible enough that it becomes more useful, both to me and hopefully to other people trying to understand what is actually possible.

This is an incredible time to be curious. It does require learning, but that is part of what makes it appealing. I want to understand this shift from the inside, by building with it and writing about what I learn. Hopefully, some of it is useful to you too.