Notes from a Hammock

I am writing this from a hammock.

Not metaphorically. I've been spending more and more of my time away from screens, trying to remember what thinking feels like without a notification interrupting every four minutes. I have a Remarkable tablet now. E-ink, no Chrome tabs, no Slack unread count haunting me from my peripheral vision. I read on it. I take notes on it. It is, embarrassingly, one of the better decisions I've made in the last few years.

This writing started there. Not as any sort of content strategy, but as a quiet place to muse.

I have a sociology and psychology background that I use every single day, which often surprises people to learn since I'm an engineering manager. The path wasn't linear. I graduated into a bare job market, picked up where I left off the previous summers at the NC Department of Transportation, doing everything from data entry to assisting with fatal crash investigations (you know, normal job stuff). I eventually ran into an old friend at a poker game, someone I hadn't seen in years, who needed someone he could trust on a two-man dev team after his partner abruptly left the company. That conversation landed me at an agency for nearly a decade doing website optimization, A/B testing, and personalization. Which is, when you think about it, the applied science of understanding how humans make decisions and designing systems that help people get where they're trying to go. The sociology degree wasn't a detour. It was the whole point.

Now I manage a development team and spend a meaningful portion of my days watching the AI conversation unfold, feeling a specific kind of unease I've been trying to articulate. Here's my best attempt.

Judgment is a muscle. A functional capacity that gets stronger the more you use it and weaker the more you outsource it. Psychologists call this cognitive offloading: the habit of shifting thinking onto external tools. The research shows it doesn't just change what we do, it changes how we approach problems even when the tool isn't there. When people repeatedly have decisions made for them, they gradually stop trusting their own judgment. Not because they become less capable, but because the loop gets interrupted: making the call, sitting with uncertainty, being wrong and recalibrating. The muscle doesn't disappear overnight. It quietly becomes less reliable, and eventually you stop reaching for it even when you could.

We've already run a version of this experiment. We handed our attention spans to engagement algorithms for fifteen years and then wondered why it became harder to sit with a complex idea. The systems weren't designed to destroy depth. They were designed to maximize engagement, and it turned out that depth was friction, so the systems smoothed it out. The result isn't that people became lazier or less intelligent. It's that the environment stopped requiring them to sustain attention, so sustaining attention got harder.

AI is a different technology with a different purpose, but the dynamic is worth taking seriously. Every time someone outsources a judgment call they were perfectly capable of making, about tone, about approach, about whether something is actually a good idea, that capacity gets just a little smaller. One call doesn't matter. Millions of calls, across a workforce, over a decade, and you haven't built a more efficient society. You've built one that is very good at reviewing AI outputs and not much else. Which is, coincidentally, a workforce that is significantly easier to manage, to commoditize, and to eventually replace.

I'm not anti-AI. I'm building agentic systems right now, and I think the version of this future where machines absorb the tedious, grinding work and people get their time back for things that actually matter is real and worth building toward. That future requires deliberate thinking about which judgment calls we hand off and which ones we protect. Right now that deliberateness is mostly absent from the conversation. The race is to automate. The question of what we're training people out of along the way tends to get scheduled for a later meeting that never happens.

So that's what this is. A place to read carefully, think slowly, say the uncomfortable thing without dressing it up, and openly ask what we're actually optimizing for and who pays when the optimization is wrong.

The hammock helps. Sometimes the best thinking happens when the machine isn't in the room.