Of Hearts and Minds

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systems-thinking

A collection of 5 issues

The Wait Is the Work

Last Sunday was supposed to be too late. The plan had us planting saplings on Friday. Pear, apple, raspberry, blueberry, each one already mapped to a spot, a season, a role in something larger we're building. We'd timed it, accounted for it, built it into the

The Chain of Trust

This essay is part of Deep Familiar Ground — a series on distributed nodes, earned trust, and the quiet work of building systems that don't fall apart when you're not watching. The companion piece is The Dirty Pool. There’s a conversation that surfaces in teams building

Learning to Code Without Writing Code

Building a Game to Learn About Agentic Systems Riding the Claude mania in January 2026 like the rest of the internet. Lobster emoji proliferated across our screens in full Moltbook fever. And I was sitting in the wreckage of having just read Steve Yegge's Gastown infamous "what

When Self-Expression Becomes Distributed

Earlier this week, I was walking a friend through my homestead project. The shared agentic system my husband and I built to manage our five-year path toward self-sufficiency and general household things. This friend is a well-respected security engineer, researcher, and practitioner. Sharp mind. The kind of person who thinks

Become the Mesh: The Homestead Agentic Web

So I was explaining this at work today, after they saw a tweet Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, whose employees are using OpenClaw to hyper-personalize their workplace. Figured I should flesh this concept out more and paint you a vision of what we are starting to build here at home.