Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

Polymathic Podcast

Reflections on building software, AI, and staying human. Subscribe to get new episodes automatically.

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About the host

Paul Welty is the author of The Work of Being: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Human in the AI Era, available on Amazon. He writes about work, judgment, and what it means to stay human as artificial intelligence reshapes how work gets done.

Recent episodes

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Featured writing

When your brilliant idea meets organizational reality: a survival guide

Transform your brilliant tech ideas into reality by navigating organizational challenges and overcoming hidden resistance with this essential survival guide.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

AI as Coach: Transforming Professional and Continuing Education

Transform professional and continuing education with AI-driven coaching, offering personalized support, accountability, and skill mastery at scale.

Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

Dev reflection - January 23, 2026

Daily reflection synthesizing work across eight projects. What does it mean for a system to be ready? When infrastructure is complete but operations aren't, when automation works invisibly, and when configuration becomes code without type safety.

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.

Dev Reflection - January 22, 2026

Hey, it's Paul. January 22nd, 2026. Today was a launch day, which means it was also a "things broke immediately" day. Dialex went live at dialex.io, and the first thing that happened was every request got blocked with a 403 Forbidden error. I talk about reasonable decisions accumulating into unreasonable situations, why iteration speed matters more than initial tool choice, and how dashboards make accumulated state visible.