Personal¶

Six levels of complexity in a Codex morning brief

This is the easiest way I know to teach someone how to use AI.

Not by starting with models, agents, or some abstract taxonomy of what the technology can do. Start with a job people already understand, then make that job quietly more powerful.

The morning brief works because almost everyone already has one. They just assemble it badly.

I think the morning brief is the first Codex workflow that normal people actually understand.

You wake up, open Slack, check your calendar, click into email, forget why you opened email, go back to Slack, then realize you have a meeting in seven minutes and no idea what happened yesterday.

The appeal is simple: help me remember what is going on.

When we were talking about Codex onboarding, this was the first workflow that felt both boring enough to teach and strong enough to matter. It starts as a dumb little orientation prompt. If you keep pushing it, it turns into a pretty good model for how people actually graduate into using Codex seriously.

Start with the thing a beginner can understand. Then add one real capability at a time until the shape of the whole system becomes obvious.

I think there are six real levels.

Codex-maxxing

I was already using coding agents a lot before Codex. Mostly, though, I used them through interfaces built for coding work: making diffs, changing repos, and shipping code.

Around November, I started pushing them into knowledge work too. I made presentations in Slidev, used agents more like note-takers with voice input, and kept looking for other artifacts a coding agent could help me produce: an index.html, a PDF, a spreadsheet, a slide deck.

The latest Codex app upgrades are the first thing I've used that make that broader mode feel native. Codex is still excellent for coding, but the more interesting shift is that it gives my work somewhere to live.

What changed my behavior was learning to give work an operating loop: a durable thread, shared memory, tools that can act on my computer, ways to steer and resume the task, and a surface where I can review the artifact itself.

What Music Do You Listen To?

People often ask me what kind of music I listen to, and in my mind I almost never remember. Today I wanted to write a little bit more about the music I listen to and share some of my favorite albums with you. A lot of this has been co-written with the Spotify API, so everything is as true as it can be.

Things

Some links may include affiliate attribution. Recommendations are based on personal use.

In the past 2 decades I went from sharing a bed with my parents renting out the unfinished basement of some Canadian family to doing quite well for myself. This is all the stuff I use, plan to use, and what's on my upgrade roadmap. Each item includes why it works for me.

Those Who Can Do, Must Teach: Why Teaching Makes You Better

"Those who can't do, teach" is wrong. Here's proof: I taught at the Data Science Club while learning myself. If I help bring a room of 60 people even 1 week ahead, in an hour, that's 60 weeks of learning value creation. That's more than a year of value from one hour. Teaching isn't what you do when you can't perform. It's how you multiply your impact.

Its a duty.

My Self-Reflection on Success and Growth

In his essay "What's Going On Here, With This Human?", Graham Duncan discusses the importance of seeing people clearly, both in the context of hiring and in understanding oneself. He suggests asking the question "what's going on here with this person in front of me?" and provides a framework for expanding one's ability to see others more clearly. Inspired by this essay, I asked myself some probing questions to better understand my own strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. Here are my reflections: