For the past few weeks I’ve made considerable gains in learning AI-related tools. Not through some formal training process, but by just doing it. I guess it’s good to heed my own advice?

Professional learning needn’t be solely focused on seemingly professional stuff, either. Part of what helped free the mental logjam of diving deep was allowing myself to use AI for fun stuff, such as creative writing. Going through that process has revealed both the power and limitations of LLMs; experiences I’ll be able to carry forward into professional use cases.

One pretty clear lesson is that, past a certain size, projects need to have some degree of structure, lest context get lost in a sea of tokens. Another lesson is that motivation for learning often comes when working on a project together with others.

To support the above, as an aid for creative writers using AI, I created this story framework repository. It contains all the scaffolding required to keep track of large creative writing projects, along with instructions to a number of AI tools on how to use it. And since it’s based on git and plain text files with markdown, it naturally supports group collaboration through branching, pull requests, and commit history.

Want to try your hand at AI-assisted storytelling? Give it a try!

I’ve had space on the brain recently, having in the last month visited both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Johnson Space Center. There’s a paradox of sorts when thinking about interstellar travel called the wait calculation (or, in simpler form, the wait/walk dilemma). The gist is that we should not launch a slow spacecraft now because one sent later with a faster propulsion system would simply overtake it. Repeat that argument ad infinitum, and you’ll never launch, hence the paradox.

These days I’m feeling caught in a similar sort of trap when it comes to learning about AI, with announcements almost daily (just this week, GPT-5 launched, right on the heels of the release of a bunch of open weight models that can run all sorts of places, including Amazon Bedrock). Just when I think I’ve identified the technology I want to really embrace, new ones arrive that create new capabilities, deprecate old ones, and demand rethinking workflows. It’s disorienting.

You know what isn’t disorienting? Photos of cool command centers. Here’s three of them from my recent travels:

I’m a sucker for a good command center, that’s for sure. But enough distractions; I know I just need to dig into deeper AI learning. That’s the trick: just start.