Coffee with Claude

Sixty years after the hypertext pioneers articulated their vision, the tools finally work at the speed of thought. What does it mean to implement ideas older than yourself?

A Geek God's field manual for excavating your own intellectual history—how to disassemble legacy systems, lost websites, and forgotten dreams to understand what you were building toward all along.

A memoir of four decades with my doctoral advisor—from beers at The Antlers bar to a joint paper that named my life's work, and the parallel paths we've traveled ever since.

After forty years building systems to extend ecological perception, I find myself inside an experiment I designed—using AI not to replace thinking, but to extend its reach.

An NPR story about inner speech sent me inward—discovering that my mind doesn’t monologue or visualize, but narrates in real time, building understanding as story even before words hit the page.

A lifetime journey from fantasy crystals to quantum physics converges on a new architecture for environmental intelligence—where temporal patterns become geometric structure.

A retired ecologist reflects on collaborating with AI to build observational tools for his granddaughter’s future, drawing lessons from the Reformation and the evolution of scientific practice.

From Mary Shelley's Villa Diodati to living neurons on Lake Geneva to my own distributed sensor network, four distinct approaches to creating intelligence converge on a single question: What is our relationship to the minds we make?

Thirty years ago, we gathered at a mountain field station to discuss how complex behaviors emerge from simple rules. Today’s debates about AI agents and alignment are asking remarkably similar questions—but now we finally have the infrastructure and tools to explore them with real-world data.

When my dissertation committee summited Mount San Jacinto in 1981, Ted Hullar brought the same rigorous mind that discovered a foundational chemical reaction to understanding wilderness conservation. Four decades later, that July dinner in Portland became our final conversation about Cornell, conservation, and the arc of a remarkable life.

I discovered that the autonomous ecological monitoring system I’ve been building isn’t safe to deploy. Two new research papers from Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind reveal that prompt injection—the vulnerability I’d been planning to work around—remains fundamentally unsolved. Here’s what that means for the future of citizen science.