Our latest customer research turned up something about how people are quietly relating to AI right now. I'm still chewing on it...and I'm still hopeful. Curious what it sparks for you. world.hey.com/neal/the-weird…

Since leaving Techstars in November, I've been rebuilding how I work from the ground up. Working for someone else meant using their tools, defaults, and opinions about how information should flow. Now I get to design my own again. Safari is where I spend a lot of my time. It's fast, lightweight, and clean. For programming, I've gone from TextMate to Sublime Text to Zed. But now most of my coding happens in conversation with Claude Code running in the terminal. Hey handles all my emails and calendars. And Basecamp handles everything else. My writing, planning, multi-project management, and files are all there. It replaces what used to require Slack and Notion and Google Docs and a dozen other things I no longer think about. That's the mise en place. The screenshots below are my actual screens. There's a philosophy behind it. Ruby is a programming language famously "optimized for programmer happiness." The idea is simple: tools that feel good to use make you more productive than tools that are merely powerful. I think the same should apply to how we organize our work. Most of this setup isn't "AI-native." That's part of why it works for me. These tools are grounded in doing real work, not promising to do it for you. AI lives in my terminal, where I'm building and coding. Everything else is deliberately calm. My setup looks plain because plain is the point. When I've used tools that can do anything, I spend more time configuring than working. Every workspace I've inherited that promised infinite flexibility looked like someone's junk drawer exploded into a wiki. I'm sure those tools work for some people, they just don't work for me. I prefer crisp defaults over endless flexibility. When I open my laptop I need to start working, not decide how to work. Right now there are zero emails, messages, or follow-ups living in my head instead of a system. This won't last forever. I'm building tools that might reshape what you see here. But everything has a place. If you've found a setup that works, I'd love to hear about it.

Years ago, I ran a coding workshop with high school students on the South Side of Chicago. Two young women came up with an idea: a navigation app that didn't just show you the fastest route, it showed you the safest one. They already knew which streets to avoid at certain times. They'd been doing this by instinct their whole lives - texting each other, sharing what they knew. They wanted to take that lived knowledge and make it available to everyone in their neighborhood. I remember the energy in that room. They weren't solving a hypothetical problem. They were solving their problem. Back then, I couldn't teach them enough to actually build it. The technical barrier was too high. Today? They could ship that app in a week. That's what I keep thinking about. Not what AI will take away. What it makes possible for people who never had access before. But here's the thing: if we're not in the room where this is being built, our problems won't be in the product. So if this world makes sense to you - if you've started to see what's possible - don't just build for yourself. Invite someone in. The people in your life who are skeptical, who haven't had time to look, who've been told this isn't for them. They belong here too.

The circus never left town. Elections. Documentaries. Trials. The AI debate. Sports. Political rage. Social media wars. Each one demands you pick a side. Feel something. Post something. While you're distracted, the future is being built by people who aren't. You might read this and think you're above it. One of the enlightened who sees through the manipulation. On the right side of history, fighting the good fight, calling out the bad actors. But the fight is the circus. Every post about what's wrong. Every argument with someone who doesn't get it. Every hour performing your values for an audience that already agrees. That's not resistance, that's the show. While you're fear mongering about AI, people are building the future with it, without you. Shaping what it becomes. Deciding how it extracts even more from you. While you're outraged about politics, systems are being designed. Policies written. Futures locked in. The people doing the actual work aren't posting about it. They're too busy preparing for the takeover. And those values you're performing? How do you know they're yours? They might just be what you've been trained to signal. Social media points for opinions optimized to spread, not to matter. I'm in it too. Every day. Fighting the scroll. Losing hours. Getting pulled into battles designed to feel urgent. We all are. That's not judgment, it's just where we live now. But here's what I keep coming back to: We're all just here trying to help each other. That's it. To enjoy ourselves, sure. But also to help our friends, families, neighbors. To do work we're proud of. Build things that matter. Solve real problems for real people. There's a better world available. Systems can be fixed. Innovation can serve people. Progress is possible. But it requires stepping out of the circus. Not to watch from the sidelines, to do the work. Not posting about what's broken. Fixing it. Not performing values. Living them. Not fighting battles designed to exhaust you. Choosing the ones that matter. The show is good. It's designed to be. But there's real work waiting. More satisfying than any post. The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?

There's a film I come back to a lot. There Will Be Blood, by Paul Thomas Anderson. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend checking it out. I won't spoil anything important. The first real dialogue doesn't come until fifteen minutes in. Before that, it's mostly Daniel Plainview alone - breaking rocks, crawling out of a mine shaft, burying a man. Very few words. So when he finally sits in front of a room full of people and opens his mouth, you lean in. "Ladies and gentlemen, if I say I'm an oil man, you will agree." And he delivers. His wells, his tools, his men, his family business - why he's the real thing and everyone else isn’t. Everything you're supposed to say when you're trying to convince a room to trust you. This is the speech most of us give. We lead with credentials, explain what makes us different, and make the case for why we're worth believing. Later in the film, Plainview is in a different room. Different town, same goal - he needs their land. But this time: "Let's talk about bread." Not oil. Bread. Schools for children. Roads to the church. Crops where there were none. A community that will flourish. He's less focused on proving himself to you. He's more focused on the better life you'll have. There's the oil we want, and there's the bread you need.