These are my thoughts on product, tech and design.

If you interacted with my last LinkedIn post, I owe you an apology. It was 100% AI slop.

This post isn't, but here's why I did it.

In December 2025, Anthropic invited Claude users to sit down with an AI interviewer and share how they use AI, what they hope it could become and what concerns them about where it's headed. Over 80,000 people across 159 countries participated, and Anthropic recently published their findings.

The findings are about what you'd expect. People want AI to do their boring work and they're worried it'll take their interesting work. The things they love most about it are the same things that scare them. Anthropic's term for this is "light and shade," which is a polite way of saying nobody knows if this is going to be good or bad.

This more or less describes how I feel too, and that's pretty relevant because I was one of the 80,508 people interviewed in this study.

For a few years now, I've been chipping away at a historical research project about Will Rogers, the early 20th century humorist and one of the most widely read newspaper columnists in America. I find his story and his role in American cultural history fascinating, and as a fellow Oklahoman I feel somewhat obliged to help tell it. He died 91 years ago in 1935, so the vast majority of his life's work has already rolled into the public domain, and the rest will soon. My project's bottleneck has never been a lack of material, but getting access to it in the digital vaults where it is imprisoned. There are many paid-only, private databases that hold incredible, sprawling troves of public domain content but are barely indexed and have interfaces that seem almost designed to punish efficiency. Using them feels like the company is daring you to reverse engineer a better option.