If it can be automated, it wasn’t the work
I keep noticing people talk about AI like it's a wave that's about to hit them. "Will it take my job?" "How do we adopt it fast enough?" "How do we...
I keep noticing people talk about AI like it’s a wave that’s about to hit them.
“Will it take my job?” “How do we adopt it fast enough?” “How do we protect ourselves?”
Those are understandable questions. They’re also a little late. If AI can do your job, the problem isn’t the AI. The problem is that your job was never designed to require the human part of you.
Most organizations have spent decades trying to remove judgment from work. Scripts. Processes. Compliance. “Just follow the playbook.” It worked because humans are adaptable. We learned to shrink.
Now the machines showed up. And they’re better at machine-work than we ever were.
Rule: if the work can be automated end-to-end, it wasn’t the work.
The work is what’s left. That’s the human era.
Why customer tools are organized wrong
This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.
Infrastructure shapes thought
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Server-side dashboard architecture: Why moving data fetching off the browser changes everything
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The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
Tag things the way you'd order them
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On the death of the author and the birth of the detector
AI detection is the latest in a long line of purity tests that pretend to protect a craft while excluding who gets to practice it. Dumas faced this in 1845. Jim Thorpe faced it in 1912. The pattern is older than AI, and it always collapses. Sometimes too late.
The ghost in the git config
We spent three hours exorcising a dead bot from our deployment pipeline. The lesson wasn't about git.
Manual fluency is the prerequisite for agent supervision
You cannot responsibly automate what you cannot do manually. AI agents speed up work for people who already know how to do it. They do not replace the need to learn the work in the first place.
The work that remains
When AI handles implementation, the human job shifts from doing the work to understanding the work. Speed without understanding is just technical debt with better commit messages.
Knowledge work was never work
Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.