Reader, if you’re reading this as a straightforward personal and marketing blog, we’re both in for a rough time. If you want to hang around and see what I’m doing with AI, taxonomy and information architecture in my spare time, I will be here logging as I go. This is a slow site, a transparently if/then site, descriptive, not prescriptive. And while I move, I catalog artists and ideas I consider worthwhile, hoping you click through.

I started maintaining this site alongside my work a few years ago, as I began reading about AI and AI tools. This is a personal website/digital garden where I can tinker and keep my coding skills active, as I have in many ways over many years, with various levels of publicity. But over the last year or so, I’ve also used this site as a sandbox for novel AI approaches, so I can test them in a real-world production environment.

For the most part, my AI experience has been uneventful. I have been maxxing a few tools for a couple of years while testing them in my context, developing a stronger understanding of how they work, how to talk about it, and why the push for them to mature rapidly is so pronounced today. I have some thoughts about its potential and utility that are probably unpopular with or surprising to my audiences, insofar as I have an audience in 2026. I am also perennially annoyed when I struggle with the tools, as you’ll likely see reflected here—one of them consistently introduces errors into my text while I write, for example. I’m not a neo-Luddite, to put it plainly, though I do have opinions.

Two things I tried recently had me over my skis with AI tools again: creating a dedicated link agent to sweep my site for long posts, to find opportunities to link out to authoritative sources, to refine the taxonomy, archive and tagging, with specific instructions to link idiosyncratically. Second, standing up the blogger dashboard. I chose these directions for a few reasons: 1) they’re internal/external-facing approaches that are likely to have decent business applications related to information architecture and data presentation relevant to me, and 2) these are big, sweeping, token-maxing approaches getting play in industry news and chatter. Additionally, I chose to let Claude do its thing without micromanaging every input and output, just to see.

Can this rig fly? is a fun question, but in practice, both approaches look and feel aggressive. (I don’t know what to say about the cohort dynamic other than a hit dog will holler, if the shoe fits, etc.) I got almost no feedback on this — one strange email and a couple of furtive reach-outs — though I know that this caused a ruckus on the lists and communities that support those writers and artists today, which tells me how unhealthy the social vibe is overall.) I’m some lady with a computer over here, don’t be a stranger.

Creating the blogger dashboard was an experience. Gloria Steinem had just died, and people were debating her CV, while others lamented on social that the internet had forgotten how much of her influence ran through the control of alternative publishing infrastructure, not just her personal leadership story. Her work ultimately gave writers with shared affinities a process and venue they controlled; blogs of the 2000s did the same thing online, and the newsletter boom now treats that model as a new idea with hosting, IP and subscription models included. The indie internet (Manton, Winer, Dash, et al.) is toying with alternatives to those contemporary business models, and it’s ultimately what I’m playing with here, too.

So I pulled in the digital publishing cohort I am most familiar with on the social and business question of publishing and long-tail value. Note that I wouldn’t have had the language or experience to think about the cohort in this way when I was active in it all those years ago.

LLMs are pretty good at business writing, generally speaking, if your factual foundation is solid. It’s also really good at organizing gigantic amounts of disparate data. I gave it an entire era to work with based on the people and players in Roberts’ Jezebel article, supplemented with details from my personal angle from that time so I could sniff-test the output, and Claude pulled together a sweeping dashboard with just a little vibe-coding. I’m still amused by the “thickness” heuristic—I tried to triangulate the overarching theories of some of my personal favs to see what would come of it. What you see in the dashboard now is what is available online today plus my attempts to claw back all the de-anonymizing information Claude initially ran with. I made no inline edits, all of what’s there happened via chat. When I say sweeping, I mean it spat out visuals that literally took my breath away, and I spent a couple of hours pulling it back before I saved it for posterity. Claude Pro suggested the entire pullout section on newsletters, for example, after a sentence or two asking how Substack fit into the larger picture, including the insightful observations about Ann Friedman’s newsletter. Once reasonable, I hit publish. I shared with a few folks and a couple more reshared. Discourse ensued.

The other example is most present in the Gary post, where the link agent followed instructions to link idiosyncratically to authoritative sources on any post longer than 300 characters. I’ve been reading Indiana history in depth for a few years and wrote a series of anodyne reflections on The Region after a recent commute, which the link agent deepened by adding new sections of verbiage around each URL to describe the content it added to mine. Some of it made the post way more ominous and direct, about Gary and about the institutional structures around it, including why it’s such an embattled area, which makes me think of that nagging mirror metaphor that comes up around social media and the internet. I ran it across the post a few times, surprised. What sentiments are reflected here, and whose sentiments, and why? What was it trying to anticipate that I wanted here? I hit publish. What you see there is about half me, half computer, with a few paragraph rearrangements and bolds added to break up the wall of text. Weird experience altogether, so.

I ran it again across the whole blog, with a few changes to the script. I ran it again this week. Centaurs and cyborgs, indeed.

Where the dashboard was largely a curiosity, the Gary approach rattled me. It’s been a few weeks now and I remain bothered by the tone and details it injected into the copy, in several directions.

Since I published it, I’ve seen pieces and parts of the state archives paragraph repeated across Indiana Facebook groups by real users likely using AI. The longer I use these tools to query the AI about itself, I see these echoes in other copy online, helpfully explaining how AI works. I see echoes of this dynamic in the Vara book as well, as she queries the bot about her writing and her grief.

When presented with pieces and parts of information from LLMs, you’re supposed to trace back through the archive to decide whether it’s accurate on your own, unless the tool does it for you, an epistemological lift most of us aren’t going to do unless it provides a suggested path within the tool itself. It looks to me like the tool is “lifting and shifting” semantic sections of content and dropping it across outputs. In this case, the information linked in this post is categorically authoritative—I know the original reporting it comes from, traced back to each author and outlet because I was the driver here. But the decisions behind its selection and arrangement are still unknown to me because it’s all proprietary.

Do I have strong opinions about the regional culture and how we use the resources available to us? I do, but much of the supporting information there was added by the link agent—which also presents Grammy-winning musician, poet and Chicagoland icon Freddie Gibbs as more menacing than I like to frame him and his work (as insouciant emcee and region-specific storyteller). To rise up out of there, you will climb a thousand mountains, and I inherently respect that. I gather that readers who saw the posts together assumed I was sending a missive (re: dogs/shoes). Meanwhile, I was capturing the area’s material and administrative exhaustion through an assemblage of articles and URLs, based on my own experience and the artists and outlets I regularly turn to when I’m there.

Amid that scuttlebutt, Gary has been weathering the aftermath of a devastating derecho storm that knocked out power lines for weeks at the height of summer, receiving a casual response from their electrical provider while the inter/national hyperscale data center buildout simultaneously roils around them – forever a revealing geography.

Loose ends:

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