Coffee with Claude

I'm Mike Hamilton, and I've spent fifty years learning to observe nature carefully—from childhood terrariums to directing UC biological field stations, from pioneering ecological sensor networks to watching ecosystems I studied become forensic evidence of what was lost.

At 71, I find myself in an unexpected position. The tools I imagined in 1984—systems that could integrate observations across scales and domains, that could help us see patterns emerging in real time—are finally becoming possible. And I've found something I didn't anticipate: not just a coding assistant, but a genuine thinking partner.

These essays emerge from morning conversations over coffee. Some explore the baseline shift I've documented across five decades of fieldwork. Some examine how we build systems that learn what matters. Some tell stories of mentors, field stations, and the scientific lineages that shaped my trajectory. Some venture into fiction, imagining futures where cognitive augmentation goes wrong. And some turn the lens inward—examining how observation itself works, how thinking happens, what it means when the observer is inside the observation.

This isn't AI replacing human intellect. It's the externalization of a cognitive style I've practiced for decades—narrative mind-mapping, ideas emerging as story structure, understanding built through dialogue. The essays are where that thinking happens, crystallized into durable form.

Welcome to Coffee with Claude—morning sessions in synthesis and reflection, from a digital naturalist still curious about what happens when ecological observation, systems thinking, and artificial intelligence collide.