Hello friend,

I’m holed up in AQ’s cabin on the Yamanashi-Nagano border in Japan, where it’s still chilly enough at night to start a roaring fire. To my delight, the bush warblers have incorporated our new saplings into their daily route. I can now put a “face” to the sounds. The woodpeckers have never needed any encouragement. They work on our roof and nearby trees with equal dedication.

My last postcard was in late January. I hope you’ve been keeping well.

What's preoccupied me since then is web app development with Claude Code. Yeah, yeah, blah blah AI. But it's been a good fifteen years since I've written code, and I never imagined I’d be typing into a terminal again! The beginning was a bit nuts. The hours melted away that first weekend. After a week, I was running a low-grade fever, like an overheated car. After a few weeks, I was losing track of all the projects I'd started, so I built a website (of course) to organize them.

The distance between an idea and some kind of working thing is now short enough to cross alone. It makes the learning curve for agentic engineering crazy fun for people like me, who have some technical chops and an inherent desire to make things. I've built many boring, tiny tools for myself and my communities, started a new line of business for Emotions at Work (more soon!), and ventured into making art about emotions. 

After three months, the fever dream has abated. Good thing, too—my fitness level is inversely correlated to my technical skill.

Along the way, I started keeping a few working principles for how I want to be building now. I’ve found it useful to look at them once in a while:

• Get in the material, choose participation over commentary

• Make to think, make to see, and stay connected to the pleasure of it

• Make in partnership

• Build for more agency and creativity (never the other way around)

• Tend to the heartbeats

• Resist the rush. Understand agentic systems from first principles.

There’s a typhoon coming and I’ve got to go. Talk soon! Tell me your summer plans, if it’s not too early to ask :)

Tomomi

News and invitations:

• I’m hosting a meetup event on June 8th in Tokyo with my friend Michael Ong. Please ping me if you can make it.

• AQ is hiring a senior product designer in Tokyo.

• New dates for ReConnect Retreat with UXR leaders: Oct 12-14 in the Netherlands. As a bonus, stay for Dutch Design Week.

• Oriana published “A room full of firefighters talking about emotions” in the latest EAW newsletter.