Software finds the pattern. A person shows up.
A foundation CEO named the line between software and people. It is the same line I design to.
Writing
Notes on design, AI, and the tools that earn their place.
The software gets a PO box
I gave one of my AIs its own email address. Not so it can email people. So it stops using mine.
A system that listens well
Most software built for relationships is built to talk. A donor experience lead asked for the opposite.
Design the exit first
Most software is designed to make leaving hard. Reversibility is the feature.
The race to the top
Seth Godin drew a line between two ways organizations approach AI. One cuts. One builds.
We surface. We never send.
Five words did more work than anything else we published this month. Trust is the list of things you commit to never doing.
Where does the intelligence live?
Six months ago I did not think sovereign Canadian AI was realistic. Now it has changed the questions I ask.
I stopped building the dashboard
In February I said dashboards were becoming scaffolding. Four months later, I stopped building one.
AI costs will stack
AI will not arrive in a nonprofit budget as one big line item. It will arrive as many small ones, and most will not replace anything.
Human or agent?
A publisher added a Human / Agent toggle to its articles. Helpful, manipulative, biased or optimized? It could be all four.
Publish once. Serve both.
The AI layer of the web is being built right now. What is still missing is the link.
The new high-fidelity is content
We used to take pride in mockups that looked real. The bar has moved from pixels to content.
The interesting part wasn't what it published
I asked an AI system to run a week of LinkedIn content. What it chose not to do taught me more than what it did.
A brand built by prompt
Thirty minutes with Claude Design produced a full identity for a fictional foundation. Then it had to survive a week of real content.
Not bigger teams. Smarter ones.
The old rule was that you grow by hiring. That rule is breaking, and the same shift is coming for nonprofits.
Content becomes the prompt
Nobody is building the llm:// protocol yet. So I built a workaround.
What is our one thing?
I stripped away the features, the agents and the dashboard to find the single thing AI4Love does for people. It was not technical.
The LLM protocol
We solved one-click linking once for browsers. AI needs the same standard: llm://
I don't do video
I am a print and web guy. I wanted an animated product demo anyway, so I built it in Terminal.
Still Standing: VoiceInk
I think faster than I type. A local voice-to-text tool that removes the slowest step.
The AI Tool Graveyard: Paperclip AI
A "zero-human company" of AI agents, pointed at real work. I became the manager of managers who managed nothing.
Still Standing: Raycast
Not every tool ends up in the graveyard. This one doesn't try to be smart. It tries to be fast.
The AI Tool Graveyard: MiroFish
Thousands of simulated agents debating your problem. Hours of compute, minutes of insight.
The death of the dashboard
I believe 2026 marks the end of the dashboard. We will stop designing places to look and start designing systems that respond.