Threads since 2021

In 2021 I published cmdncmds, one issue a week. Each issue gathered a few quotes I had kept, each followed by my own comment. Over the year that made 52 issues, 129 comments and one longer essay: about 20,000 words of mine.

I hadn’t read them in years. This week I went through all of them again, to write down how I write on this site, as I told in the logbook. What I didn’t expect was to find, in those old comments, so many of the threads I’m pulling today.

What I set aside

I’ve been logging for a long time. Quotes kept, links clipped, notes, comments, logbook entries: everything I set aside or write as a trace of my interests, my positions and my reflections.

More than four years of notes in Obsidian, and two years of web clips. The habit was real, but I never had a routine solid enough to come back to it, and in the end the whole thing froze under its own accumulation. For years, all that material was a dormant load.

Rereading cmdncmds was the same kind of material, seen from five years away. And this time it didn’t stay dormant.

The threads

Here is what I found, with the 2021 text on one side and what I’m building now on the other.

• Reading beyond my feeds. In issue 40 I listed what I did to get out of the mainstream feeds: a collection of small blogs in my RSS reader, and a habit I summed up as “search more, browse less”. Today my personal knowledge base reads my feeds and newsletters for me, and produces personalised reviews based on my interests and my feedback. It’s built to learn from me over time.
• Taking notes to use them. In issue 35 I wrote that journaling and taking notes was the best way to recall and build on past thoughts. The notes piled up, unused. The knowledge base I started on 26 October is the version where they finally get used.
• Sharing work in progress. In issue 11 and issue 36 I wrote about how much more there is to learn when you share early, and how slowly I was learning it. This site has a logbook, built out in the open, one working day at a time. It also brings a bit of gamification to growing these projects, and to publishing what matters to me, here and now.
• The smallest step. Divide and conquer came up in issue 6, when I was learning to code, then in issue 18 and issue 32. This autumn, the first build session of the knowledge base kept things deliberately small, I tried the triage on a small sample before letting it sort everything, and the site moved to its repository starting with the foundations rather than everything at once.
• A hobbyist developer. In issue 34 I called myself “a recreative developer”. I was self-taught long before AI. What changed is that AI coding tools pushed my ambitions past what used to limit me.
• A generalist. In issue 52 I wrote that I felt like a generalist, and that skills from different fields connect in unexpected ways. That thread runs through everything I do now. I can build this knowledge base with AI because I know how to use the tools, and this website because I know the code. And all of it feeds my work on design systems, and my thinking on the role of AI in our jobs, and beyond. Having such varied interests is what makes it possible: many dots connect with each other, and bring targeted results, but also unexpected ones. Serendipity.
• Writing more, talking less. In Is work working?, the essay of issue 47, I wrote about remote work and the meetings that end with “let’s meet again with more substance”. What I took from it then: write more, talk less, and share things sooner. Today my projects run on written issues, briefs and decisions.

Seeing those old texts reconnect to the present, with clear links to what I’m doing now, was funny, and comforting. It’s easy to forget what you once wrote. When it still makes sense, it gives a sense of alignment. Where I no longer agree, I can see how I’ve changed.

From dormant load to asset

Logging everything used to be a dormant load. With AI as the go-between, it becomes an invaluable asset: it can make connections I never had the time to make, and the better it understands me, the more useful it is, right now.

This isn’t a promise. It’s the small system already in place. The logbook of this site started on 10 October, the knowledge base on 26 October, and the site went live on 1 November. On 29 October, the knowledge base took in its first batch: more than a hundred Safari tabs, a handful of feeds and about sixty newsletters, and seven themes came out of what that batch actually contained. I could never have imagined launching this, and producing what we have, in so little time.

Keeping the ideas mine

There’s a tension in this, and I’d rather say it. An AI that understands me better also ends up shaping what I read.

I accept it, for a few reasons. I decide what goes in: the RSS feeds, the newsletters, the specific links I send. I couldn’t process all of it myself anyway. And I keep an eye on what comes out. When I see an interesting article title, or read an article with a potential quote, I check whether the system surfaced it on its own. If it didn’t, I give it the information, so it keeps refining.

Delegating doesn’t mean reading less. I won’t stop reading what I come across and what sparks my curiosity. On the contrary, I can now do it without having to choose. I want everything else processed, because it lets me spot weak signals more easily, and make stronger, better argued links between the opinions I form myself and what the AI brings up.

I want AI to help me write, not to think for me. Katie Parrott describes the risk well in How I Escaped AI Autopilot: polished output looks finished, and we easily take it for correct. Matt Ström-Awn finds the same trap in code review: asking whether the code looks good instead of whether it does what we want. I turned Katie Parrott’s first answer, think before you look, into the way I start every article, as I told in the logbook: an almost maieutic exchange, where the AI asks and what I think comes out of me. This article started that way.

Its understanding of me is a long-term goal, not something it has. If I want AI to work well for me later, I have to tune it now, and keep my critical thinking and my authority along the way.

The method, since 2021

Looking back, Is work working? was more than an essay about remote work. I had collected highlights on the same topic over several weeks, and wrote what I called “a note for thoughts” to go through all of them. Without naming it, I was following a method I want to keep: collect, observe, note, connect, and distil the essence into an article, with its sources linked and quoted.

That’s what the knowledge base and this site are built to carry on. The knowledge base collects, helps me observe and note, and brings up connections I wouldn’t have had the time to make. Which ones hold, and the essence I draw from them, stay mine. This article is the method applied to my own past: what I had set aside in 2021, connected to what I’m building now.

Logging everything was a dormant load for years. Seen through these threads, it was also a way of getting to know what I care about. With AI as the go-between, I can finally do something with it, and push my ambitions past what used to limit me.