i work in architecture. this is where i keep the notes.

who i am

the seat i work from

I'm a technical designer at an architecture firm in Honolulu. I also ended up as the person who works out our AI side: writing the rules for using it safely, checking the security questions, training people, building the workflows we actually use. When a tool fails here, it fails on a real project with a real deadline. That's most of what I have to write about.

One limit worth saying out loud. Everything I know comes from seeing one mid-size firm from the inside. When I'm generalizing from a sample of one, I'll say so.

habits

things i keep relearning

None of it is original and I still relearn all of it. Give a tool the least freedom it needs to do the job, and start it read-only. Before automating a task, check whether it can just be deleted instead. Test small, then decide on your own numbers rather than the vendor's slides. And boring beats clever: if a workflow needs babysitting, it isn't finished.

the writing

why i write it down

Mostly I write to think, and this is where the thinking goes. The thread running through it: AI is making drawings and documents cheap to produce, and it is not making judgment cheap, because judgment is what someone signs their name to.

One disclaimer. Everything here is what I believed on the day I wrote it. In this industry, opinions go stale about as fast as Anthropic and OpenAI ship new models. When my mind changes, I say so instead of quietly editing the past.

off the clock

Outside of work I run a couple of small side businesses, keep a second brain made of plain text files and git, and get overruled daily by a dachshund named Soondae.

contact