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„Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.” — Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos (1803)

(Near is, / and difficult to grasp, the god. / But where danger is, grows / the saving power also.)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled Thinking with Claude: why Cyborg writing works better than Centaur writing. In the LinkedIn comments, a reader named Christopher pushed back: Leaning on AI to help me write, he argued, was training my brain to “surrender executive function to external sources.” Examples: freed prisoners overwhelmed by everyday choices, ex-military struggling with civilian life, people leaving long-term institutional care. The source doesn’t matter, he wrote. The offloading pattern is the same.

While my initial answer was along the lines of “using your executive function is a choice”, I think it’s not that simple, after all, and I owe Christopher a real answer. In fact, his comment pushed me into a weeks-long thinking journey, during which I looked for research, came across interesting related articles, and reflected a lot on my own AI use. I also jammed with Claude, and yes: I used the very tool Christopher warned me about to think harder about his warning. We’ll get to that contradiction later.

TL;DR: AI made the coding part of software fast, and that speed didn’t create chaos so much as expose where your organization was already slow: the hand-offs between teams. The fix isn’t a better tool, it’s better wiring. We rewired Dev and Ops once already and called it DevOps. The next wall, between business and engineering, is coming down the same way. Here’s how to see it, and one thing you can do tomorrow.

Last month I sat down with Cris Roata to record an episode of her podcast, Catching More Green Lights in Life. It went live today! Cris asked me what I tell people who are afraid of AI, and I gave the answer I usually give: treat it like an intern, train it patiently, expect the first attempts to be…

Detailed write-up by Michael Leibovich on how he used Claude Code (inside the Claude Desktop app) for implementing his own Chief of staff setup.

As someone running a very similar setup myself, I particularly liked his use-case descriptions and the insights coming out of “externalizing your thinking”. I can totally relate to that!

Also, I agree that installing Obsidian and giving Claude access to it through its REST API plugin and MCP are great for giving it a structured, extra memory layer beyond its own memory mechanism. Claude can write Obsidian-style Markdown documents directly to the file system which is faster than going through the MCP/API, but the real value is the ability to search for existing documents through MCP that allows Claude to discover notes, make cross-correlations and more.

I would add a few things from my own perspective here:

In February this year, I wrote about why I stopped trying to engineer prompts and started delegating intent instead. That post argued the skill of working with AI is managerial, not technical. I still think that’s right. But over the last couple months I’ve noticed something else: even with good del…

Most people use AI like a search engine with extra steps. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. I did too, until I accidentally stumbled into something completely different.

Over the week, I’ve turned Claude into my personal Chief of Staff. What’s a Chief of Staff, you might ask? Think of these people who follow executives around, whispering important things into their ear, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.

If you’ve watched The Fifth Element (go watch it, if you haven’t, it’s a great movie!), you know the scene: the president’s aide leans in and whispers something absurdly specific like “You have 19 more meetings after this one.” That’s essentially what Claude does for me now. Except I’m not a president. And thankfully, I have less meetings. I’m a freelance consultant living near a forest in Bavaria.

This post is a bit of a recap: how it happened, what the system actually looks like, three lessons I learned along the way, and, at the end, an unedited interview where I asked Claude seven questions about what it’s like to be my Chief of Staff, with some interesting insights. Don’t miss it!

Here’s a video I just uploaded to YouTube, walking through 7+1 examples of how AI has woven itself into my daily life — from the mundane to the surprisingly useful. No demos, no hypotheticals, rather what an actual week with AI looks like for me.

TL;DR: The best “prompt engineering” technique isn’t engineering at all—it’s delegation. Transfer intent, not instructions. For quick tasks, tell the AI what success looks like and why (the Intent Prompt). For complex work, equip it with context, deliverables, and decision principles so it can navigate on its own (the Delegation Brief). You already have these skills. This post helps you apply them to AI.

According to media pundits, software stocks are “crashing”, and there’s a “SaaSpocalypse” going on. Recently, Noah Smith wrote about “The Fall of the Nerds,” painting a picture of software engineers as the new master weavers: skilled artisans about to be displaced by AI-powered looms. Meanwhile, I’m…

I’ve been transcribing my YouTube videos locally for a few months now. It took some trial and error to get a setup that actually works reliably, so here’s what I learned. The problem I wanted good subtitles for my videos—for accessibility, but also so I could feed the transcripts to Claude for gener…

After 27 years in tech—working at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS, then coaching dozens of colleagues through promotions from both sides—I’ve learned something that most people get backwards: Your career belongs to you. Not your company. Not your manager. Not the promotion committee. Everything el…

A YouTube viewer reached out to me the other day after watching one of my videos. He’d just started at a big tech company and wanted to know: How do you navigate the fog? How do you figure out what to focus on? What are things to avoid?

I’ve felt that fog three times—at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS. And after 27 years and countless conversations with mentees, I think there are three phases that help cut through it.

A 25-year career without goals—and why that worked better than the alternative This guitar is more than 15 years old. It’s my second one—the first was bought and sold in the ’80s. I tried lessons. Self-teaching. Regular practice. Still couldn’t play a recognizable song. Now it collects dust, remindi…

Most people use AI the way our parents used the Internet in 1995. They’d dial up their modem, check the weather forecast on Yahoo, maybe look up a recipe, and call it a day. The idea that this same technology would eventually let them video call their grandchildren, run a business, or access humani…

Watching Werner Vogels deliver his 2025 re:Invent keynote last week, I experienced one of those rare moments where separate threads suddenly converge. There he was, Amazon’s CTO since 2005, laying out five principles for “Renaissance Developers”, and I realized: these weren’t just career advice for …

In 2014, I was preparing my AWS re:Invent presentation on “Running Lean Architectures.” I had my slides ready: agenda, bio, resources. Then I stopped. Why was I presenting this in the first place? The answer: to help people save money on AWS. Not to check boxes on a corporate template. Not to prove …

On constrained serendipity, learning by doing, and whether the system is the art. I’m chatting with Claude, kicking around ideas on building a tool that generates AI images, but without the prompting. I like to start these chats by brain-dumping ideas into it. In this case it’s about auto-generating…

February 1998. Munich. Sun Microsystems. My first customer presentation. I stood in front of a roomful of IT professionals with a marketing deck about our “newest, better workgroup server.” I hadn’t rehearsed beyond flipping through the slides a couple of times. I didn’t know who these people were o…

A package arrived a few months ago. Inside: a deck of cards with a red telephone on the box. “The Mentor Deck” by Seth Godin. I’m a beta tester, so I got one of the first 2,000 decks ever made. Each card has a QR code on the back that launches an AI conversation with a virtual mentor—Seth himself, o…

I had a problem.

I wanted to create a YouTube channel and had my first video ready to go, but then… nothing. Weeks passed. I had ideas, I had equipment, and I’d watched enough tutorials to edit like a pro. But I couldn’t get myself to shoot video number two.

Classic procrastination.

So I did what I often do when I’m stuck: I talked to Claude. But this time, I didn’t just ask for advice. I invited two experts into the conversation to help me figure this out.