Building

Syd, the personal assistant that runs in my house, took a big step this week: prompt caching on every turn, prompts managed and evaluated in Langfuse instead of living in code, and a delegation path where Syd hands a fix to a coding agent and opens a pull request for me to review. It also reads the house through Home Assistant now. Next is making it interrupt me less.

WOPR shipped on September 6. It is a small mobile puzzle-combat game, a homage to a 2012 iPhone title that vanished from the store. Five encounters, upgrades, a tutorial, offline install. Play it on a phone. It was built for one.

MsgStack is in its v2 shape: canon domains owned by departments, an approval lifecycle, and artifact generation grounded on approved entries. The next work is the on-ramp for teams that have never thought of their messaging as a database.

Writing

The blog series You Can Just … Things has two parts out: giving an old laptop a job, and putting it on a real domain without opening a port. Backups are the likely next part, because I recently had to fix mine. The newsletter, Notes from the Machine, follows the series with a shorter, more personal version.

Speaking

This year's talks were the PMA Seattle keynote on automation and authenticity, the CMO Alliance AI Summit session on building a context engine from messaging, and two Leland career sessions. I am taking fall and winter bookings on AI in marketing, EQ leadership, and nonlinear careers. The speaker kit has bios and a one-sheet.

Coaching

A small number of one-on-one clients through The Climb, mostly people at a career inflection point who want a thinking partner rather than a script. Sessions are booked through Cal.com. I keep the roster short on purpose.

Life

Seattle, with Katia and three cats named Izzy, Poncho, and Raja. Pink Floyd most evenings. Still thinking too much about the origin of the universe and whether the many-worlds interpretation might be true.