Resources
What I'm drawing from.
A curated stash of books, writers, and tools I keep returning to. Lightly annotated, occasionally updated, ruthlessly honest about what actually earned its keep. This is the stuff behind the essays.
Books that shaped how I think.
Not the most-cited, not the most-recent - the ones I keep reaching back for when something hard needs thinking through.
The Master and His Emissary
The book that gave me the language for why "Shared Intelligence" could not just be a faster individual. McGilchrist's argument about hemispheric attention is doing real work behind my essays, even where I do not cite him directly.
The Innovator's Dilemma
Required reading for any operator. The chapter on how sustaining innovations capture the existing market while disruptive ones quietly build the next one is the lens I used through all of AEFIS.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
The book that broke open my interest in mind, recursion, and how meaning emerges from structure. Still the most generous, playful book I have read about hard ideas.
Billions and Billions
The Sagan book I return to when the work starts sounding too clever. It keeps scale, skepticism, and responsibility in the room without losing wonder.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Less for its specific findings, some of which have aged poorly, and more for the discipline of taking your own reasoning as something that should be examined and not trusted.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I return to Twain for the same reason I return to McGilchrist: to be reminded that clarity is a moral act. The voice on this site, when it is working, is reaching for him.
The Human Condition
Arendt's distinction between labor, work, and action is quietly underwriting my thinking about what AI changes for teams, and what it must not change.
Writers I read consistently.
These are people whose essays I read whenever they ship, across operator, technical, and philosophical registers.
Ben Thompson
The model for serious, disciplined business writing on the internet. The aggregation framework alone is worth a decade of subscription.
Tyler Cowen
For breadth, restless curiosity, and the model of writing consistently and lightly over a very long time horizon.
Patrick Collison
For what a founder's writing room can look like when the founder takes ideas seriously. Sparse output, very high signal density.
Venkatesh Rao
For the unreasonable rigor of the conceptual frames he builds. Half of what I write has a Venkatesh-shaped scar on it.
Tools I actually use.
Not the stack people claim to use on social media. The stack that's open on my laptop right now. Lightly opinionated; honestly current.
Sociail
The product we're building, used by our small team every day while we shape it. I work, write, and decide in the same shared rooms I'm describing in the essays. There's something honest about a tool you're already willing to use for your own real work before you ask anyone else to.
Claude
The AI I do real work with: for thinking, writing, sparring on hard product calls, and serious code review. The model that most consistently disagrees with me when I am wrong.
ChatGPT
For longer thinking work - research threads, working through frameworks, drafting at length, and returning to the same problem across days. A patient companion for the marathons, where Claude is the model for the sprints. Both earn their place.
k3s
Sociail runs on k3s across our on-prem and cloud hybrid cluster. After $16K/month cloud GPU bills, the lesson was not cloud vs. on-prem. It was treating infrastructure as product strategy.
Temporal & LangGraph
The two layers behind Sociail's agent architecture. Temporal for durable workflow control; LangGraph for in-run reasoning. Each one is doing exactly the thing it is good at.
What I'm reading right now.
Updated when the stack changes - usually about once a month. The dates are honest; nothing here is a performance.
- Co-Intelligence, by Ethan MollickFor the practitioner-level framing
- Working in Public, by Nadia AsparouhovaOpen-source as a social form
- The Anthropic team's research blogRequired reading right now
- Re-reading The Information, GleickOld book, new questions
A list, not a shrine.
These lists are not meant to be canonical. They are what's actually working for me, right now, with full honesty that three months from today some of it will be replaced and a few embarrassing entries will be quietly removed.
If something here genuinely changes how you think, write to me. The best parts of this list are recommendations I got from readers in exactly that way.