Hello World

I’ve long toyed with the idea of a personal blog and hold a tremendous respect for those who share freely, and better still, share something noteworthy for interested readers. What held me back? The million things clawing for my own attention? The notion that my thoughts are unoriginal and / or unworthy of another’s attention? The discomfort in sharing publicly and the burdensome worry that I might be judged? A little bit of all of those things I suppose!

What Changed?

What changed? Generative AI, GenAI for short. I use tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code daily, and finding myself increasingly dependent on them for my work. I’d consider myself a cautious proponent. As a people leader, I’ll talk about practising and continuing to develop the ability to learn, think critically, and take sound decisions. The reality is that I’m not practising enough.

We’re in danger of outsourcing our thinking to AI. Exercising the mind by committing to daily, focused reading and writing allows us to retain the ability to think for ourselves. Yesterday, I read an article about the countdown to AI usurping us in the workforce and it inspired me to get started. The real danger, the article pressed, is that we’ll lose our ability to think deeply and both reading and writing are essential enabling components of thought.

Out in the Open

While I have no intention to share my posts in public forums, there’s just something about the act of publishing publicly that’s nurturing—it’s a vulnerable act of self expression that fosters self-understanding and builds confidence.

The Unassisted Mind

I’ve titled the blog ‘The Unassisted Mind’. The reality is that our minds are assisted in many ways. Language itself is a tool. In the context of this blog, “unassisted” speaks to the fact that GenAI is not involved in the authoring of posts. All words on this blog will be written by me, the author, without the assistance of AI. All words will be reviewed by me, again, without the assistance of AI. Post structure and the ideas for the posts themselves will, yes, you’ve got it, come solely from my mind. It can be slow, and a little painful (I have a tendency to overthink), but every post is an act of practice.

The irony is that the blog was whipped up in a matter of minutes by Claude Code. At my own insistence, I’m using Hugo, a static site generator written in Go, and I’m hosting on Cloudflare Workers. I’m deploying with npx wrangler deploy from my local machine, but the next step is automating the publishing of new posts with GitHub Actions.

Topics I’ll Explore

My current interests, and likely target for posts, extend to the following areas:

• People, product, and engineering leadership
• AI—GenAI and agentic AI specifically