The brief that keeps changing By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, There’s a particular kind of exhaustion I keep hearing about. It’s not burnout, exactly. It’s not being overworked. It’s something more specific, the feeling of being asked to plan something when the thing you’re planning for keeps shifting underneath you. I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. And more and more, it has AI somewhere in the middle of it. Here’s a version of a situation I keep encountering. Someone is working on two large...

OpenClaw Part 2: The 🦞 didn't replace Claude. It made me laugh instead. by Jeff Humble Dear Designer, In Part 1, I spent €590 on a Mac Mini, two days in Terminal, and $3.14 in API tokens I didn't mean to burn. I ended with a list of seven things I was going to automate with my OpenClaw agent 🦞. I only got to one of them. Getting an AI agent from zero to useful takes longer than any article will tell you. Most of the time since then has gone into figuring out how to make it reliable, not into...

The System You Can't See By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Here's a question I get more than any other: "How do I handle the person who talks too much?" Or the flip side: "How do I get quiet people to speak up?" And every time, I want to say: you're asking the wrong question. Not because those moments aren't real or frustrating. They are. But because treating them as people problems is like looking at algae blooming in a pond and asking, "how do I fix the algae?" You don't. The algae isn't the...