I write essays and books. I build software and games. I keep bees and skate ramps. These things are more connected than they look. The essays make a case for taking the harder path — in craft, in work, in the things worth not handing off. The current arc is taste, judgment, and craft in the AI era, but the subject is older than AI and will outlast it. The catalog holds forty-seven technical books across two decades plus a bunch of translations. The vault is where the older material lives, including the origin document for everything I’m working on now. For more on the software and games I build, check out Stalefish Labs .
Note
The part of my writing that feels most like me is the part I worried was starting to look like a machine. A chess scandal says the suspicion runs the other way, which turns out to be worse news, not better.
August 8, 2026 · responding to medium.com
August 7, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 24 of 24 so far in The Automation Line
Height often stands in for skill in basketball — and AI is height anyone can rent. On the tape measure coming for everyone's sport at once, and what happens to the earned middle when everybody suddenly clears the bar.
August 5, 2026 · by Michael Morrison
Article 23 of 24 so far in The Automation Line
There is a class of products whose success metric is the user disengaging — falling asleep, finishing the book, putting the controller down. Sojourn is one. The category inverts almost everything in product design, and the next decade will need more of it than the dominant playbook predicts.
Note
I built a tool that detects AI writing and it called me a fake. So I went looking in my 2008 blog archive, and in a book O'Reilly copyedited before the iPhone had an App Store. The tells were already in there.
August 5, 2026
Note
John Douglas of the Trashcan Sinatras died on August 3rd at 63, three days after the band released its first album in a decade. He was in it from 1986, played on all seven records, and wrote a great deal of what that band is.
August 4, 2026 · responding to trashcansinatras.com
Note
Andreas Goeldi figures 20 to 30 percent of what he reads each day was generated just for him, text nobody else will ever see. Print spent five centuries handing every reader the same fixed page. Its successor is quietly taking the page back.
August 4, 2026 · responding to agoeldi.medium.com
Becoming Gnarly
Essays on AI, work, and choosing the harder path when it's worth it. New ones by email as they're published.
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From the Vault
Stalefish Labs · 2009
The morning I demoed an iPhone app on cable news during the financial crisis, learned that TV interviews are conducted from dark rooms, and discovered …
From the Catalog
Head First Labs · 2008
Since we all tend to learn through failure, to what degree should the learning process involve the deliberate engineering of failure?
From the Builds
Complete (rain catchers later removed) · 2012
A pair of self-watering raised garden beds built from galvanized stock tanks — sub-irrigated from a gravel reservoir below, fed three different ways, …