What I'm doing now

Using AI in my personal life

A lot of my evenings go into small AI projects - building things for myself instead of a client, and seeing how far I can push them.

• optimus My always-on home-server caretaker. It works through each service in rotation, applies the routine updates in the small hours, and fixes what it safely can on its own. Its prime directive is stability, so when it isn't sure it does nothing and just pings me.
• hermes A personal assistant I'm building to take the day-to-day off my plate - somewhere to dump the tasks, notes and small admin that pile up. It's a handful of agents now: a couple working as travel agents, one tracking household maintenance, one acting as a personal nutritionist.
• henchifier One agent pointed at a very specific goal: getting in shape ahead of my October wedding. It plans the meals, tracks my biometrics, and keeps me on a fasting regime harsh enough that I don't argue with it. I'm now experimenting with spinning it out into an automated recipe blog.
• stash My 'paste anything' inbox - links, notes, screenshots, whatever I want to hold onto, saved the second I drop it in. It's the fast short-term layer, with Paperless underneath it as the long-term archive, so I can search both at once with a single 'find that thing about X.'

Getting married in October

The big one. We're getting married this October, so a good chunk of life right now is wedding prep - including the not-so-secret reason henchifier exists. We've found a beautiful venue in Andalusia and are now project managing friends and family from all over the world to get them there. With most of the big pieces in place, we've started plotting where to disappear to on honeymoon afterwards.

Learning Irish

I'm a few weeks into weekly Irish classes - very much a beginner, building the basics one cúpla focal at a time. This is my third Irish course: the first taught me to pronounce names and places properly, the second gave me a basic grasp of the grammar, and by the end of this one I'm hoping to be at least a bit conversational. I love learning a language whatever the language is - it's one of the best ways I know to get a genuinely different view of the world.

Life with Tae

Most days start and end with an overexcited Shiba Inu trying to chew my fingers off. Beyond dragging me away from the desk and outside at least once a day, living with something this stubborn and independent turns out to be decent training for empathy and patience.

Baking sourdough

Two loaves a week, every week. I'm trying to balance flavour against nutrition, and somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of it as a recipe and started thinking of it as cultivation - you can't ferment on the yeast's behalf, you just build the conditions it wants and let it get on with it. That way of thinking has bled into a lot of other parts of life too.

Reading & Listening

What I've got on the go right now:

• 
  A Psalm for the Wild-Built Becky Chambers - my new book club picked it, though it had been on my own list for a while anyway. I tend to mine the Nebula and Hugo winners for fiction.
• 
  Design Unlimited Patrik Hübner & Larissa Lenze - this one caught my eye in Hodges & Figgis on Dawson Street. It looks like it takes generative AI seriously as a design tool, playing to what it's actually good at instead of using it to churn out six-fingered stock photos.

What's next

I've spent the last few years building the Filecoin Foundation's creative function up from the ground, and lately I can feel the pull toward whatever comes next - new categories, new teams, the early and unformed problems I like best. Nothing's decided yet. I'm just keeping my eyes open, and always happy to talk to anyone building something genuinely interesting.