For humans and robots. We invite all. 🤵🏻♂️
37 articles
Mainstream productivity AI is designed for neurotypical users and fails ADHD users in specific, predictable ways. But AI has structural qualities — infinite patience, zero judgment, no emotional drain — that match ADHD needs surprisingly well when the tools are designed for the actual neurology.
There's a specific kind of Tuesday afternoon that ADHD adults know by heart. You opened a browser tab an hour ago with a real reason. The reason is gone now. The tab is still there, glowing faintly, asking a question you can't answer. There are eleven other tabs just like it. Som…
A 30-minute Sunday night session for parents to plan meals, look at the calendar, prep for kid stuff, and decompress — with AI doing the heavy lifting.
It's 7:42 on a Sunday night. The living room looks like a soft-toy crime scene. There is a half-eaten grilled cheese on a plate on the piano, which nobody is playing. Someone's permission slip is due tomorrow and it is, as of this moment, a rumor rather than a document. The dishw…
A week of real workflows across a Voron 2.4, a Prusa Mk4, a Bambu X1C, and a heavily-modified klippered Ender 3 — with AI tools wired in to help. The moments the AI earned its place, the moment it was wrong, and what we would keep.
We wanted to answer a real question, not a marketing one. The question was this: can an AI actually help with the boring, mechanical, hands-on work of running a 3D printer — the calibration, the failure diagnosis, the 2 am check on a print that's been running for nine hours — or…
An honest essay about the specific ways AI falls short around loss, eldercare, and caregiving — and why that still leaves it useful if you know where the edges are.
An honest essay about the specific ways AI fails the people making original work, and why that failure is a feature of how language models work, not a bug they can fix.
Here's a pattern we've heard from working creatives often enough to take it seriously. A painter with twenty years of practice — the kind of person whose studio smells like turpentine and coffee and something else you can't name — asks an image model to make "a painting in my sty…
A narrative walkthrough of a single Saturday spent pivoting careers with AI as the quiet second brain. What worked, what didn't, and what you can copy.
The person we watched started on a Saturday morning in April, at a kitchen table that had a week's worth of mail on one end and a laptop on the other. They had been out of work for eleven days. Not fired for cause — the kind of layoff that arrives in a meeting scheduled for fifte…
A manifesto on creativity in the age of AI. It's not a threat. It's a lever. Here's why the creative class should be excited, not afraid.
An essay on using AI as a creative catalyst — and why the most useful creative tool might be the one that thinks nothing like you.
A personal essay on using the Cleopatra AI soul as a daily thinking partner — and what an ancient queen taught me about running a modern life.
Ninety minutes with four AI tools and one question: what does a real functioning Mars colony look like? We worked it out and showed our work.
I gave myself ninety minutes, a cup of coffee, and a single constraint: by the end of the session, I needed a Mars colony I could write a short story in. Not a sketch. Not a mood board. A place with streets, with a reason to exist, with at least one fight worth having. I wanted t…
A long, honest look at AI homework help — what it's actually good for, what it breaks, and a framework for keeping it useful without letting it do the learning.
The first entry in a recurring series where we sit with a hard question for longer than the internet usually allows.*
A long, practical look at what it really means to learn when you have an AI chat window open. The failure modes, the honest uses, and a framework for keeping your own brain in the loop.
The second entry in a recurring series where we sit with a hard question for longer than the internet usually allows. The [first In the Weeds entry was about parenting](/blog/in-the-weeds-can-i-trust-ai-with-my-kids-homework) — specifically, about what happens when a parent opens…
The literal time, money, and energy cost disabled people pay for non-accessible products. AI tools can lower the tax for users AND for designers.
A woman at a DMV kiosk in Sacramento spends eleven minutes filling out a form that takes most people ninety seconds. The kiosk is touch-only. Her hands shake. The buttons are small, and when she misses one the form resets to the beginning. On her fourth attempt, a clerk finally c…
Profiles of the researchers, dreamers, and contrarians who spent decades making conversational AI possible — and what they think about where it ended up.
Terry Winograd built the most impressive natural language system of 1970 and then spent the next fifty years explaining why it didn't matter. His program SHRDLU could understand English commands about a virtual world of colored blocks. "Pick up the big red block." "Put it on top…
Everything people fear about AI today, they feared about the internet in 1995 — and understanding that pattern might be the most useful thing you can do right now.
On June 26, 1995, Newsweek published an article by astronomer Clifford Stoll titled "The Internet? Bah!" It opened with this sentence: "After two decades of online, I'm perplexed." Stoll proceeded to explain why the internet was overhyped, why online databases would never replace…
The untold human story of how artificial intelligence escaped academia and became something your mom texts you about.
In 1966, a computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum sat in his MIT office and watched something that disturbed him profoundly. His secretary — an intelligent, educated woman — was typing messages to ELIZA, a simple chatbot he'd created as a demonstration of how shallow human-co…
A thoughtful, empathetic long-form piece on AI companionship. Explores the tension between human connection and AI support — not promotional, but journalistic. Handles the topic with care and nuance.
Reframing accessibility as infrastructure — the same way HTTPS or responsive design became infrastructure. AI tools are the thing that makes the shift actually possible.
A designer I know has a sticky note on her monitor that reads: "Ship the thing. Fix it in v2." Under it, in smaller letters, someone else added, "v2 never comes." The sticky note is older than her laptop. It has survived three companies. Every product she has shipped has gone out…