My daughter turns one next week, which made me realise I've been happily hibernating. Perhaps I should do a Yearnotes at some point... til then...
This week all the talk about "watermarking" LLM generated text pushed me off the fence about using LLMs for writing. I wrote about it – I wrote about it – here.
In work, I've been focused on community and content. Turns out Sephora just shut down their featured-in-every-deck-ever forum and moved those conversations to Reddit, presumably for the gains in GEO (and maybe some cost saving?). Also this week, it emerged that GPT 5.6 has reduced its citations from Reddit. The wild west of AI continues.
I had a great chat with Carissa about AI and the future of work, in particular multiplayer AI for teams. AI use is very individual at the moment. Lots of engineering teams are experimenting with documentation that is shared with LLMs too. This gets fuzzier with the more upstream strategy work where LLMs struggle to give the right weight to different facts or ideas, and where including the wrong doc can quickly poison the context and make everything that comes out quite useless. I had this recently with a shared NotebookLM which was working fine until some meeting notes got added and our own speculative ideas started getting cited as evidence of customer needs. Summarising and synthesising are different things. Personally, I don't let LLMs do either for me because I maintain that insight is "to see what everybody else has seen, and think what nobody has thought".
Derek Sivers wrote about how he bought some land and has been building a house there by only adding what he (and his son) need as they need it (Building not Predicting). This is what anyone who is vibe coding their own tools needs to read. It's really easy to build a ton of SKILL.md files, or an interface with a hundred features because it's so damn fast to do it and because it's fun and cool. Plus, if you're going to build software for yourself then it should be doing something better than the SaaS you could pay for right? But better here should mean more personal to you, and not just more features.