A few weeks ago I was walking my property taking pictures for a conference talk. I’ve owned this place for about a year and a half. Twenty acres on a former gold mine in the Sierra foothills. The previous owner’s documents showed one mine. I’d explored it, mapped the air shafts, found a box labeled DYNAMITE that turned out to be road flares. I thought I knew what was here.
Then I saw a dead tree that had no earthly business being where it was. Fallen across a hillside, covering something. I moved it. There was a second mine entrance.
A year and a half. Satellite imagery didn’t show it. The documents didn’t list it. I found it because I was there, with my hands, paying attention.
I keep coming back to this moment. Not because finding a mine is normal. It isn’t. But the pattern is. You don’t find things by reading about them. You don’t find them by asking an AI to summarize the terrain. You find them by showing up and moving the dead tree yourself.
I run an AI company. I spend my days building tools that help developers work faster. I also spend my weekends welding, running a chainsaw, and building a round house on this same property. People sometimes ask how those two things connect. This is how. The question I care about, in software and in construction and in everything else, is the same: does this tool make you more capable, or does it make you more dependent? Are you still the person who walks the property? Or did you stop going outside because the satellite image looked fine?
I’ve been writing about software and open source for a long time, scattered across company blogs and conference talks and threads that disappeared. This site is a place to collect the thinking I want to keep. About AI, about tools, about building things with your hands, about what it means to run a company in the middle of all of it.
Some of it will be about the property. Some of it will be about open source. Probably more overlap between those two than you’d expect.
I’ll let you know what we find in the second mine.