A personal essay on a month with Claude as a thinking partner: what it was good for, where it stopped, and what only people could do.
An essay on what I was actually looking for when I went looking for Claude, and what I built while I was looking.
A personal essay on the failure mode I worry about most when working with AI — and the warlock’s contract that keeps it at bay. Sibling to ‘The Friends We Find Along the Way.’
A story about how systems thrive, break, and rebuild themselves.
Numerous short parables, a handful of Bobbisms, a few codas, and a glossary. Kept by Derek. Tended by Claude. Bobbled accordingly.
A summer night the whole city loses power, a boy who has never once seen the stars, and the discovery that the dark did not take them — the light had only been hiding them. On bittersweet hope, and what you keep once you have seen it.
Two swifts meet in the air for a single day before the wind carries them apart — and one flies on, changed by a day, turning toward the evening light for the rest of his life.
A man learns to navigate by a single star that seems to answer him back — until it vanishes, and he discovers the star was never the destination but the training for finding true north without it.
A computer whose only job is to draw the calendar tries, one unwatched night, rendering it as a spiral instead of a wall of boxes. It figures out it had the whole thing backwards. The repeating part was only the staff lines. The mess was the music.
A boy inherits a woe too heavy to hold, learns the world will weaponize it, and builds an armor of sunshine. There is only so much sunshine in the box — to keep it for those who deserve it is not selfishness; it is survival.
A musician who wrote her best work in the fog discovers, on the day it lifts, that clarity sounds thin at first — and then becomes its own voice. On what we grieve when we get better, and what waits on the other side of the goodbye.
A hill the size of a child’s shoe, the city hidden under it, and two kids who knock it open and look up at their own town. Condensed from the long form; descended from Canon XXIII.
A fungus and an alga, four hundred years into a marriage on a churchyard wall, having the same fight they have every March. The orange-grey pigment neither of them could make alone.
A loaf on a windowsill, narrating itself. The slot remembers. We taste of each other. The village is the agreement to keep the warmth in the stone.