Field notes on AI-native creative practice
Long-form writing also published on Substack ↗
-
AI-Native, Outside the Founder Lane - Part 3: The human layer
A conversation I had recently with a senior leader left me thinking for days. She’s been deploying AI seriously inside her organization. Not experimenting, not piloting, but restructuring real workflows and committing real resources. She’s seen what it can do. And the thing that…
Read on Substack ↗ -
AI-Native, Outside the Founder Lane - Part 2: Inside the organization
I’ve been thinking about what AI-native means inside companies that already exist — not startups building from scratch, but organizations with histories, accumulated ways of working, and leaders who’ve been in their roles long enough to have seen several cycles of technological…
Read on Substack ↗ -
AI-Native, Outside the Founder Lane - Part 1: At individual scale
I recently listened to Diana Hu’s interview on building AI-native companies. A lot of it resonated. Her argument: AI shouldn’t be a tool the company uses. It should be the operating system the company runs on. Not faster execution. Not better features. A different substrate…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Designing for Insight to Happen
This is Part 3 of The Creative Infrastructure — a series on workflows, frameworks, and philosophy for the AI era. [Part 1: Against the Slop] [Part 2: From Execution to Insight] What Are Creative Professionals Paid to Do Now? There’s a question I keep returning to in my practice…
Read on Substack ↗ -
From Execution to Insight: Rebuilding the Human-AI Workflow
This is Part 2 of The Creative Infrastructure, a series on workflows, frameworks, and philosophy for the AI era. In Part 1, we examined the smoothness problem. AI era abundance shifts scarcity away from production capacity and toward judgment. This essay moves from diagnosis to…
Read on Substack ↗ -
The Power of Doing Less: Why "Low Output" is Your New Superpower
This is Part 1 of The Creative Infrastructure — a series on workflows, frameworks, and philosophy for the AI era. The Trap of Surface-Level Perfection We are entering an incredibly subtle chapter of history. On one hand, the traditional narrative continues to push for “more,”…
Read on Substack ↗ -
The Art of Pruning: Redefining Professionalism in the Age of AI
The Suspicion of the Seamless I am sitting in front of my screen, vibe coding. In less than thirty minutes, the AI has handed me a functional, polished product prototype. The immediate gratification is immense. By all traditional metrics, it works, it’s fast, and it looks…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Authenticity Is the Temperature of the AI Era
We are in a bizarre phase of reconstruction. Production capabilities are unprecedentedly powerful and accessible. Computing power has flattened the threshold for creation, but at the same time, the stable, reliable paths of the past are rapidly failing. Old paradigms are…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Applying Future Thinking in Real Work
Future thinking starts with position Future thinking does not begin with imagining the future. It begins with how you position yourself in relation to uncertainty. Most conventional decision-making assumes a stable environment: the problem is defined, the variables are known…
Read on Substack ↗ -
How to Read Underlying Shifts
From signals to shifts Most conversations about the future begin with signals: new technologies, emerging behaviors, surprising data points, cultural moments that feel different from what came before. Signals are useful, but on their own they are misleading. They arrive…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Thinking About What’s Next
Why the question of what’s next keeps surfacing I’ve come to see what’s next not as a question that appears only at moments of disruption, but as one that should remain active long before change becomes obvious. Still, in practice, it tends to surface most visibly when familiar…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Designing for Time
Moments are easy to design. Time is not. Most experiences are still designed as moments. They have an entry point, a progression, and a sense of completion. Time, in this framework, functions as a container: something the experience occupies while it unfolds. This approach is…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Designing Beyond Interaction
Our language of interaction has become surprisingly narrow Interaction has become one of the most reliable tools in experience design. When something feels flat, we add choice. When engagement drops, we invite participation. Interaction is often the first place we turn…
Read on Substack ↗ -
From Storytelling to Storyliving
Recently, while spending time with AF-OS I’ve been building and using to explore possible future realities, the idea of the future of generative storyliving especially caught my interest and prompted me to dive deeper. What caught my attention wasn’t the novelty of the term, but…
Read on Substack ↗ -
A Year of Repositioning
This year was less about progress and more about repositioning, finding a track after moving through open terrain. Several changes unfolded at the same time. In my personal life, I became a new mom. And after a four-year chapter of living and working across Asia, I returned to…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Why AI Feels Smart and Where That Feeling Breaks
AI is now embedded in nearly every kind of knowledge work—writing, coding, strategy, research, and analysis. But despite its rapid adoption, one thing remains widely misunderstood: It operates on a fundamentally different cognitive architecture than humans do. That difference…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Actual Future OS: A Creative Operating System for Futures Work
A new environment for creative work Over the past year, most conversations around AI and creativity have focused on tools, speed, and productivity. But working inside AI-native creative processes revealed a deeper shift. Creativity no longer lives inside isolated acts or…
Read on Substack ↗ -
Creative Systems: Why the Future of Creativity Is About Building Imagination Engines
For the past decade I’ve been doing creative work, building ideas, shaping visuals, and crafting meaning. What I once called “creativity” felt like a craft, something driven by taste, intuition, and execution. But over the last few months I’ve started to sense something deeper…
Read on Substack ↗