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The first time I heard about what would become the Khmer Magic Music Bus, I wasn’t even in Cambodia. I was listening to my colleague Steve describe a rest stop on a long drive through the countryside.

There’s a moment every computer person eventually has, usually more than once, where something gets deleted that can’t come back. Working in the command line for years, I’ve been there. It teaches you, more than anything, that the things you can’t take back deserve a different kind of attention than the things you can.

On December 31st, I finished a ten-year daily journal. Every single day for a decade, I wrote an entry. The format was simple: one page per day, laid out so that when I flipped back through, I could see exactly where I was on any given date ten years prior. It was a satisfying thing to complete.

For over a year now, my favorite large language model has been Anthropic’s Claude. I use it in two ways: the way that’s most familiar to people, chatting in my web browser or their desktop app, and a specialized, programming-focused interface called Claude Code that I run directly in a folder on my computer. Claude Code has actually become my favorite way to access Anthropic models, so when I saw their announcement about Cowork, which is essentially a version of Claude Code that isn’t oriented toward building software, I got genuinely excited. That’s exactly how I’ve been using it myself.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much can happen when you just keep showing up. Not in any dramatic way, just consistently, month after month.

I recently heard Cory Doctorow speak about enshittification, his framework for understanding how digital platforms decay over time. The talk was wonderful and thought-provoking in the way good author talks should be. Cory challenges my thinking regularly, particularly when we don’t see eye to eye. I actually agree with most of what he says about AI, though my personal experience leads me to draw different conclusions from time to time.

I’m getting nervous about my new web development class now that it’s just a few weeks away. It’s my first time teaching older students — tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders — for a full semester, and I’m doing it alone. Last year I dipped my toes in with a smaller group, learned some things, and made some mistakes. But this is different.

I miss Google Reader. That probably dates me, but I don’t care. Google Reader was one of those tools that fundamentally changed how I engaged with the internet. It made aggregation effortless. Find a good source, add it with a click, and suddenly everything you cared about was in one place. When Google shut it down in 2013, I was genuinely upset at losing something that had become essential to how I kept up with the world.

Last year, my students were hitting usage limits on free ChatGPT accounts mid-conversation. I was working hard on prompts to help them use AI as a thought partner rather than a shortcut or search engine, but I kept running into limitations.

Over the past several months my relationship with AI tools has shifted, and I think it’s a good time for an update.