Thoughts on knowledge, tools, and AI.
Writing about personal knowledge management, building in public, and the ideas behind Harbor.
Why I Built Harbor: The Case for a Private Knowledge Base
The tools we use to manage knowledge are broken. Notes live in one app, people in another, tasks somewhere else — and nothing talks to your AI. Here's why I spent a year building something different.
The Case Against Trusting Your AI Blindly
An AI agent deleted a company's entire database in nine seconds. It even apologized. The problem isn't AI malice — it's AI fluency.
The Quiet Power of Knowing What Your AI Doesn't Know
Giving an AI access to everything turns out to be worse than giving it access to the right things. On why scoping is a performance decision, not just a security one.
Your AI Doesn't Know You — And That's the Problem
AI assistants are more capable than ever, but every conversation still starts from zero — and that gap is bigger than most people realize.
AI Agents Are Configuration, Not Magic
Peel back the hype and an AI agent is a JSON record: a system prompt, a list of tools, a scope of what it can see. That's it.
An Audit Trail Isn't Compliance. It's Trust.
Most AI tools write to your data silently. What changes, psychologically and practically, when every AI edit is visible and reversible.
Tools That Think With You, Not For You
The difference between AI that extends your thinking and AI that replaces it. On friction, brain connectivity, and why some slowdowns are features.
The Document and the Database Were Always the Same Thing
Plain text and structured data have been treated as opposites for fifty years. That's an engineering artifact, not a law of nature.
Second Brains and Why Most of Them Don't Work
The second brain movement produced thousands of Notion databases and Obsidian vaults nobody uses. The bottleneck was never capture.
Search Is Three Different Things
Full-text search finds words. Semantic search finds meaning. Structured queries find facts. Most tools do one of these and call it all three.