Six days in Paris, one closed laptop, and a hackathon idea I did not mean to have.
It has been rainy and cold every day we've been here, and it couldn't be more perfect.
The rain seeps under your layers in a way that surprises you. Crowds thin out, everything looks clean, and Paris in the rain turns out to be romantic in a way I didn't expect to be true. We keep telling each other it feels like we're inside a movie scene, and that we cannot believe we are lucky enough to be here.
The weather is the funny part. We brought rain gear we did not use in Dublin in September 2024, and used it more in Paris than we ever did in Ireland. We did not bring enough warm layers, because we believed Paris in May would be warm. Two cities, two wrong predictions, both wrong in the right direction.
I came off a build sprint right before we left, finishing a demo for a buildclub.ai submission, which I do not need to tell anyone is one of my least favorite parts of shipping. Got on the plane, closed the laptop, and didn't look back. Today is May 19, which means six days off the laptop. No building, no brainstorming, no LLM conversations, just Instagram scrolling, checking NBA playoff scores, and taking more pictures than I will ever organize.
I didn't know I needed it until I had it.
On not building
Getting on the off-ramp was easier than I expected, partly because I let work go almost completely, and partly because for the first time in a long time I do not have another project deadline waiting for me when I land. I should also confess that I sprinted to finish work before I sprinted to the airport, twenty-two hours in two days to clear my desk, which is not my finest professional moment, but it did mean that when I closed the laptop, there was nothing pulling me back.
There was no cinematic moment where I felt the sprint end. It was more that I finished the task, looked up, and noticed that for once there was no next thing.
My brain did not go quietly into that good night, exactly. AI news kept showing up in my feeds. I saw something about the Elon versus Sam Altman lawsuit and chose not to read it, which is its own small victory. But I stopped reaching back for it.
On day three of our trip the email about The Coding Kitty hackathon landed in my inbox, and from there my mind started to wander on its own time. Another build percolating, ideas drifting in and out, wandering feet and a wandering mind. Different from building. Adjacent to it.
My wife said at one point that she appreciated my undivided attention, which is a generous way of pointing out that I usually have at least one hand on a qwerty keyboard. She was not wrong. I had not realized how much of my attention had been getting routed through a screen until the screen wasn't there.
On walking, reading, and thinking
The thing about being off a screen for six days is that you do not stop thinking. You just think differently. Walking does some of the work, reading does some of the work, and the rest happens in the spaces between the two, waiting at a crosswalk, sitting down for a coffee, the moment between closing the book and looking up.
I have been reading Dan Brown's The Secret of Secrets on this trip, which turns out to be apropos in a way I did not plan. The novel is about consciousness, whether it lives inside the brain or whether the brain is more like a receiver tuning into something larger.
Brown spends a fair amount of the book on the sheer scale of what is happening between our ears: three pounds of tissue, eighty-six billion neurons, more compute than any data center on earth. The book is not really about AI, but it is impossible to read it as a builder in 2026 and not feel the question hovering. We are pouring billions of dollars into making machines do something our own grey matter does on a baguette and a glass of vin rouge.
So I would read a chapter, close the book, and walk. Or I would walk, stop, and the book would surface. We have walked an absurd amount on this trip, nine miles in one day was the high water mark, and I cannot tell you which idea arrived during which walk, because that is not how it worked.
The walking, the reading, and my badly-broken attempts at French were all running together. I have been mashing English, Spanish, and bad French for six days, asking for the bathroom in the wrong language and apologizing in a third, and the not-quite-fluency turns out to be its own form of thinking. Nothing lands cleanly between those three linguistic worlds. Everything has to be reached for. The reaching is the part that wakes the brain up.
Somewhere in all that walking and reading, an idea for the next hackathon started to form. Not in a flash. More like terroir. The Coding Kitty email on day three was a vine. The Secret of Secrets was soil. Paris, with its rain and its walking and its borrowed languages and its closed laptop, was the weather that let it grow.
Le Click
Back to the hackathon email. I read it, registered that the theme was cat-related, and felt a small deflation. Cats are not my thing. I should have known a hackathon from Coding Kitty would lean feline, but somehow I had not put it together. I closed the email and assumed I was out.
A day or two later I mentioned it to my wife at the Musée de l'Orangerie, in the room with the Monets, because I was excited and could not help myself. She shushed me, lovingly. No AI in the water lilies. Fair. I shut up and went back to looking at the paintings.
Here is the thing about me and cats. I am not a cat person. I am allergic to cats. The cat we lived with came as part of the package when I married my wife. Her name was Penelope, and she was my wife's BFF and my long-running frenemy. It took her years to let me pet her, and even then I could barely touch her without my eyes swelling shut or a scratch on the hand. Ninety-nine problems and a cat named Penelope was one of them.
She passed in February. This is the first trip we have taken where we did not need a cat sitter. We are flying home to a meow-free house, and we both already know how loud that quiet is going to be.
So when the hackathon email said cats, I was not the obvious audience. But I had fourteen years of trying to figure out one specific cat, and somewhere between the Orangerie, and the AirBnB in the 6th, my brain started turning that into a problem statement.
Cats are inscrutable. The people who love them are obsessive about understanding them. There is almost no scientific consensus on cat behavior, even among researchers. And humans have a several-thousand-year-old framework for making the unknowable feel readable, which is astrology. Some of it or none of it is real. All of it is useful for naming a feeling. BFF? Frenemy?
By the time we got back to the apartment, my wife went to nap. I had an idea and I wanted to push on. I opened the laptop for the first time in six days and started talking to Claude.
We worked through it. A cat astrology app, but with the deterministic spine doing real work: birth chart math from real ephemeris data, daily nudges tied to actual kitty quirks, behavior logging as the input loop. The astrology is the vocabulary. The structure underneath it is the catnip.
The name landed in the conversation: Madame Minou. Madame for the fortuneteller persona reading the stars. Minou because it is the French diminutive for cat and it is warm. A little sister to Madame Steep, the persona I built last month for a fortune-telling app that reads tea leaves over your GitHub repo.
From the other room I heard my wife wake up. "Are you working?!"
Yes. Yes I am.
No regrets.
What this trip is teaching me
I went to Code with Claude in San Francisco on May 7th. (Ye-yo!) I closed my beloved laptop a few days later, after my buildclub.ai deadline on the 12th, and got on a plane. The London edition is tomorrow, May 20th, and I had a chance to go. I am not going. My wife is supportive, and the seat was mine to take. I chose Paris instead.
That choice is a quiet relief, actually. Since July of 2025 I have been building, shipping, submitting, winning, and showing up almost continuously, and there have been stretches where the work has felt louder than everything else.
Saying no to a Claude conference I genuinely wanted to attend, in order to walk around Paris with my wife in the rain, is the kind of choice I am glad I am still able to make.
But here is the part of the trip that is teaching me in more ways than one.
Building follows you. It is not always at a keyboard, in a terminal, or inside an LLM conversation. It is in your imagination, your wandering attention, your three-pound brain doing what no data center can do, which is to make connections you did not ask it to make. Six days off the laptop and my brain handed me a hackathon idea I had not been looking for, dedicated to a cat I never quite got to pet.
I closed the laptop in California. I opened the Chromebook in Paris. In between, I lived a life that was not about building, and the building happened anyway.
That is the part I want to remember. Building never stops, even when the laptop is shut. Sometimes especially when the laptop is shut.
In memory of Ms. Penelope Randall. May 2009 to February 17, 2026. Tuxedo. Frenemy. The reason this dev.to article exists.
AI assisted. Human approved. Powered by NLP.
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