Category: Uncategorized

Old desktop computer showing Google Search beside a modern laptop with ChatGPT, illustrating the evolution from web search to conversational AI.

AI Did Not Arrive in 2022 

AI did not suddenly appear with ChatGPT. The breakthrough was access: decades of complicated technology placed behind a simple text box. The next chapter will be about making that intelligence into products people can understand, trust and use.

JakeLeave a comment

When we talk about AI now, I’m not even sure we’re supposed to call it AI anymore. Depending on who is talking, we may already have moved on to SI, for superintelligence.

I digress.

Before I offer my thoughts on AI security incidents, whether these systems will help find new cures for cancer and other diseases, or whether we are all headed toward some extinction-level event, I think we need to rewind. The current conversation often makes it sound as if artificial intelligence suddenly appeared a few years ago. It did not.

The term artificial intelligence dates to a 1955 proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, led by John McCarthy. The workshop took place the following summer. That makes the field about seventy years old, depending on where you choose to start counting.

It was not new when I entered the technology business either. We talked about AI, machine learning, neural networks, and expert systems. The tools were narrower, the hardware was less capable, and the interfaces were not built for everyone, but the ideas were already there.

I first started calling some of my own work robots in 2001. When I told people I built robots, I would usually get the same kind of response: “Like R2-D2?”

We have always attached a body to the word robot. We picture wheels, arms, blinking lights, or something that walks into the room. I used the word more broadly. To me, a robot was a computer program that performed a task on my behalf or helped me complete one.

The robots I was building worked in the ticket business. We built systems that helped purchase and price tickets. We built systems that facilitated orders across multiple parties, handed work to credit card processors and shipping providers, and kept transactions moving when no single company owned the whole process.

Those systems did not look like R2-D2, but they were doing work.

As the years went on, the techniques changed with the problems in front of us. Around 2007, we built technology around shipping and logistics, including systems that gathered shipping behavior and submitted refund requests to small-parcel carriers. As that business became more data-driven, we found uses for genetic algorithms, evolutionary approaches, Bayesian networks, decision trees, random forests, and neural networks.

In another company started in 2011, we worked with social media data. We used natural language processing and natural language understanding to make sense of what people were saying in posts. We assigned sentiment scores and confidence measures. We used keyword matching and image object identification. None of it was perfect, but all of it belonged under the broad AI umbrella.

By 2015, robotic process automation had become a major part of our work in ticketing. The retail side of the industry had consolidated, competition had changed, and the business needed to become more efficient on the back end. By 2019, micro-pricing and dynamic pricing created new demand for pricing intelligence and forecasting. If you could not respond to changing market conditions, you risked missing the profit you expected. Those pressures are still part of that industry today.

I go through that history for a reason. I had been building robots and applying AI techniques for years before large language models entered the public conversation. AI was real. It was useful. It was also mostly hidden inside specific products, research environments, and professional systems.

Then ChatGPT launched publicly on November 30, 2022.

That changed everything, but not because intelligence had suddenly been invented.

I think the closest comparison is Google Search. Google was not the first search engine. Databases were not new. The web was not new. What Google did was put an enormous amount of complexity behind a remarkably simple experience. There was a logo, a text box, and a couple of buttons. You did not need to understand indexing, ranking, or distributed systems. You typed what you wanted, and something useful came back.

ChatGPT did something similar for AI. It took a collection of ideas and capabilities that had largely been available to researchers, technical teams, and specialized businesses and put them behind a text box. You did not need to know how to train a model. You did not need to understand neural-network architecture. You did not need to write code. You could type a question in ordinary language and get a response.

It felt like magic because the complexity disappeared.

The speed of adoption has been remarkable. By July 2025, OpenAI reported more than 700 million weekly active ChatGPT users on its consumer plans, nearly ten percent of the world’s adult population. But even that kind of growth is not without precedent when we look beyond AI.

Television went from an invention and an experiment to a fixture in American homes. By 1970, 95 percent of U.S. homes had one. Household computer ownership was only 8 percent in 1984, then climbed dramatically over the next few decades. In 1998, more than a third of U.S. households already owned a cell phone, years before the iPhone changed what a phone meant.

Once a technology becomes useful, affordable, and easy enough to reach, adoption can move very quickly. The large-language-model revolution is unprecedented inside the history of AI. It is much less surprising inside the history of technology.

You might even call it predictable.

The pattern tends to repeat. A technology begins with researchers and a few professional use cases. It develops alongside the infrastructure that already exists around it. Commercial products appear. A few companies gain momentum. Consolidation follows. The technology finds an early use case that is not necessarily the final one, but it is useful enough that people start paying for it. Eventually, it becomes hard to imagine life without it.

That does not mean today’s winners will be tomorrow’s winners. The early internet was full of companies that once seemed unavoidable. Some disappeared. Some were acquired. Some helped teach the next generation what to build. Pets.com and AltaVista still mean something to people who lived through that era, but neither became the final shape of the internet.

The AI story is not finished either.

In fact, I think we are entering the harder part: product design.

The original ChatGPT experience was powerful because it was so simple. Since then, the major AI companies have been racing to capture more of our work and more of our attention. OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Cursor, xAI, Google, Meta, and others keep adding models, modes, tools, agents, applications, and new ways to use them. We have moved from websites to command lines, mobile apps, desktop apps, and now back toward cloud systems as personal agents and long-running work take hold.

Every individual step may make sense. Taken together, the story is getting harder for an average person to follow.

What am I supposed to use? Where does it run? What can it see? What can it change? Which model should I choose? Is this a chatbot, an assistant, an agent, or an entire operating environment? When should I trust it, and when does a human need to step in?

The companies building these products often appear to be chasing one another. One launches a feature and the others race to produce their version. AI makes code easier to create, but producing more code is not the same thing as having a clear product strategy. Catching up on a feature list does not guarantee that people will understand what the product is for.

That is one of the questions I keep thinking about as we build CoffeeBreak.

We released Launch Check in September as a focused first product. It is meant to help small teams and vibe coders reduce some of the friction between building a working application and putting it in front of real users. It gives them a second look at what they built and surfaces things they may not have known to ask about or that a model working with limited context may have missed.

Today, those findings can be reviewed in a useful interface and shared as a report with tools such as Claude, Codex, or Lovable. The next step in our product direction is to connect those findings to Mission Control so the work does not stop at a document. The mission can continue, the issues can be addressed, and the path from idea to production can become more coherent.

Over time, our goal is to let people run their own missions with a useful set of tools and integrations, then work with different Personas that have clear roles, guardrails, audit trails, and the right level of intelligence for the task. Those experiences should be able to meet people where they already work, including surfaces such as Slack and Teams, mobile and messaging, vehicles, and eventually robotics.

That is the bet, anyway.

I do not think the future of AI is one giant chatbot that is allowed to do everything. I think it is a set of understandable products that coordinate models, tools, memory, deterministic logic, and human judgment. The intelligence may be impressive, but the product still has to make sense. It has to be clear about what it is doing, what it is allowed to do, and when it needs help.

The first AI revolution put remarkable capability behind a text box. The next one will have to turn that capability into systems people can understand, trust, and use in the middle of real life and real work.

Before we decide whether AI will cure everything or kill us all, it is worth remembering how we arrived here. The technology did not appear in 2022. Access did. The interface changed. The audience changed. Then the rest of the world started building on top of it. What comes next is still being written.

Work gloves and an American flag rest on a wooden fence overlooking a Midwestern yard and cornfield at sunset, with a soccer ball in the grass.

The Work That Fills a Life

JakeLeave a comment

Labor Day weekend has always felt like a punctuation mark at the end of summer.

The weather may still be warm. The grass is still growing. This year is no exception. The recent heat wave here in the Midwest is a reminder that summer is still with us, at least for the moment.

But this is when routines begin to shift. Time is undefeated, and the calendar reminds us that another season is coming.

This season, life looks different than it did just a few months ago.

My son started preschool and wrapped up his first season of soccer. With so much changing around him, he has taken a few steps backward in other areas. Things around our house seem to be breaking left and right. The latest is a leaking washing machine that I need to investigate later today.

Then there is Transcendent Software. Every day brings a new challenge as I work to build something special and lasting.

So much is going on. Some of it produces an invoice. Much of it never will.

There is almost always another task waiting. That can make it easy to measure life by what remains unfinished.

A holiday like Labor Day is a good reminder to pause long enough to see the other side of the list.

The repaired thing is working again. The animals have been cared for. The project moved forward. Someone received help. An idea became a little more real. A family was supported. A responsibility was fulfilled.

Work is not valuable simply because it keeps us busy. It matters because of what it helps us build, protect, improve, and provide.

It also matters that we occasionally put it down. That is a lesson I am still learning with each passing season.

The list will still be there tomorrow. Today, it is worth appreciating the people whose effort keeps homes, businesses, communities, and families moving.

And it is worth remembering that a good life is not built through hard work alone. It is also built by making time to notice all the important reasons we did the work in the first place.

Happy Labor Day.

Two people pass an open notebook across a shared wooden desk covered with project materials.

Making Room for Help

JakeLeave a comment

When you work by yourself, you learn how to keep moving by doing everything yourself.

You know everything in progress. You know where the files are. You know which task can wait and which one cannot. You know what you meant in the note you wrote three weeks ago. You know the half-finished idea behind the thing that is already live, the thing that is almost ready, and the thing that still needs one more careful pass.

Very little has to be explained because all of the context lives in your head.

That can feel efficient, and for a while, it really is.

Then one day, you realize you have started giving up one thing to do another.

You sacrifice marketing to make sure you are selling. You sacrifice selling to make sure you are building. You sacrifice building to make sure the finances are in order.

Then the loop starts over.

And over.

And over again.

Eventually, it is time to call in reinforcements.

This week, I decided to get some help. Part of that help will allow me to keep building. Another part will take on many of the other tasks I have been juggling.

The first mission is to turn the content, launch planning, follow-up, and all the little pieces around the business into something more consistent. That is work I have needed help with for a while. It is also work that cannot simply be tossed over the wall with a cheerful note that says, “You’ve got this.”

My job now is to share context. To explain what I am building, why I am building it, who it is for, what is ready, what is still changing, and which promises I am not willing to make just to create a louder launch.

That means I have to slow down.

My first instinct is not always to appreciate that part. I can see the product. I can see the next post. I can see the list of things that would move if I just put my head down and pushed.

Slowing down can feel like losing momentum, especially when I already know there is a gap in the content and a launch I want to get moving.

But there is another way to look at it.

When I first started my career, I carried the weight of the world on my shoulders. At one point, I was visibly stressed, and my boss noticed. He pulled me aside and told me that if I were going to succeed in my career, I had to learn to delegate.

I took his message to heart.

There was a bigger truth in it. If a process only works because one person is carrying all of its history, priorities, and next steps in his head, it is not much of a process yet.

It may produce results, but it does not create much capacity. It also makes it easy for the urgent thing to crowd out the important thing because no one else can see enough of the whole picture to help steer.

Making room for help is work.

It means explaining decisions that used to be automatic. It means turning scattered notes into something another person can follow. It means being honest about what is settled and what is still an experiment.

It means accepting that someone else may organize the work differently, work at a different pace, ask a question I have skipped, or notice that the story makes sense in my head but not yet on the page.

That temporary slowdown is not the opposite of progress. It is how the work becomes bigger than one person’s available hours.

We have been preparing a broader rollout for Launch Check, the first focused product coming out of the CoffeeBreak work. I could keep treating that rollout like one more thing I need to carry across the finish line alone. I have done plenty of things that way.

Instead, I am trying to do something that may matter more in the long run.

I am sharing the load. I am giving someone else room to get oriented, understand the story, help build the content system, and make the launch stronger than it would be if I simply rushed to make more noise today.

That does not mean the work has stopped. It means the work has changed.

There will still be something to publish today. There will be more to share later this week. The Launch Check rollout is coming into focus, and there is plenty happening behind it.

But the lesson I am sitting with right now is not really about launching a product.

It is about learning to stop measuring progress only by how much I can personally push through in a day.

This is a natural progression. Sometimes the next stage begins when you make room for another person to see the work, understand it, question it, and help carry it forward.

That may make the work slower for a little while. But the goal was never to prove that I could carry everything alone.

The goal is to build something useful, put it into the world, and build a business capable of supporting whatever comes next.

Sharing the product starts with sharing the work.

Wet country garden with thriving tomatoes beside flooded and damaged plants, overlooking green grass, a pond, and an apple tree.

The Same Rain Means Different Things

JakeLeave a comment

When we bought our acreage in 2005, it was a former cornfield one full season removed from production. You could still walk across fairly bare earth scattered with corn cobs, mud, and weeds. The ground was hard. The dirt was dry. After years of farming, what was left near the surface was mostly red clay.

There were large ravines and ruts everywhere. Berms had been added over time to manage runoff, and a couple of patches that stayed too soggy to farm had become overgrown with weeds and trees. You could look at the land and see years of people trying to work with the water, even when the results were not especially graceful.

Over the next fifteen years or so, I did plenty of that myself. I knocked down some berms and changed where the water flowed. We added a pond to catch runoff. We added a driveway and fixed the ditch along the road so water would actually pass through the culvert and continue toward the creek. There was grass seed, pond work, tree work, rerouting, maintenance, and no small amount of money.

I worked hard to get the ground into a more manageable form. Not finished. Not controlled. Manageable.

That distinction matters when you own land.

The maple tree we planted about ten years ago is a good example. It was barely a twig when it went into the ground. Now it is large enough that my son climbs on it. Nothing dramatic happened on any single day. It simply received years of water, sunlight, care, weather, and time.

I planted two apple trees, too. A deer got one of them. The surviving tree grew, and I eventually planted another little one that will need years before it becomes much of anything. That is the nature of planting. You do the work now and wait for fruit later, knowing there are no guarantees.

This year, we are getting no apples. I am fairly sure a late freeze got the blossoms. I have also noticed insects taking over a couple of limbs, so those need attention before the damage spreads farther.

There is no reason to panic. Observe what happened. Do the next right thing. Trim what needs trimming. Protect what can be protected. Learn something for the next season.

All of that has had me thinking about how unusual 2026 has felt on this property. It has been one of the hottest and wettest years I can remember since we moved here. That combination has me mowing thick, green grass every week in August. In a normal year, I would be mowing every two or three weeks by now, and much of the grass would already be turning brown from the summer heat.

Not this year. This year we still have green grass, and we have plenty of it.

The rest of the acreage has responded in its own ways. We had a strong harvest that started with winter crops and moved into strawberries. I did not even get to the asparagus before it was three or four feet tall. The garden woke up early. Flowers bloomed early. The grapes burned off quickly. Tomatoes are arriving in droves. We have plenty of peppers and potatoes. The sweet potatoes drowned out. Squash borers ended the squash after we got around ten fruits.

The same heat and rain that helped one thing overwhelmed another. The same conditions that kept the grass lush left me mowing constantly. The same season that gave us tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and flowers gave us no apples at all.

The same rain means different things depending on where it falls, when it arrives, what is growing, and what that particular thing needs.

I think life works that way more often than we admit. We like simple rules because simple rules feel controllable. Rain is good. Heat is bad. Growth means success. Loss means failure. But the truth depends on the season and the system surrounding it.

Owning land keeps teaching me that I do not tame nature. Nature does what it does. I build systems. I redirect what I can. I maintain what needs attention. I adapt when the old plan stops fitting. I plant again when something does not make it. And when the work finally bears fruit, I try to slow down long enough to enjoy it.

There will always be another rut, another damaged limb, another crop that does not cooperate, and another stretch of grass that needs mowing sooner than expected. There will also be maple trees that become climbing trees, ponds that catch the runoff, gardens that produce more tomatoes than we can keep up with, and little apple trees worth waiting on.

I cannot control the rain. I can pay attention to what it changes and decide what to do next.

That is the nature of things, and that is why I need to go out and mow again today.

Three-jaw oil-filter wrench, hand tools, used oil filter, and oily shop rags on a barn floor, with a utility vehicle and zero-turn mower in the background.

The Tools Do Not Do the Work

JakeLeave a comment

We all have some version of this story.

There is a job that needs to be done, and we need the right tool for it. We go to the store or start searching online. We watch a few YouTube videos. We compare options, read reviews, and convince ourselves that once we have the right tool, the job will finally get easier.

Sometimes it does. Just not always in the way we expect.

Two years ago, I bought a John Deere XUV590M Gator to get around our property faster. It is a nice machine with a dump bed, and I got a great deal on it. The dealer had ordered it for another buyer who backed out. It was not configured exactly the way I would have built it, but they wanted to move it, I paid less than the sticker price of a standard one, and I came out ahead.

A new piece of equipment comes with a few early maintenance milestones, and the first oil change arrives quickly. Filters installed at the factory can also be stubborn the first time they come off. This one was no exception.

I spent hours trying to remove that oil filter. My cousin came over, and we tried tool after tool. We changed angles. We changed grips. We tried every trick we could think of. After four or five hours of fighting it, we finally got the filter loose.

We completed the oil change, but I knew I did not want to repeat that experience the next time.

John Deere sells a socket made for its oil filters, so I bought one. I also found another tool that has become one of those small workshop purchases I appreciate more every time I use it.

It looks a little like a three-legged spider. You attach it to a socket wrench, and the legs tighten around the filter as you turn. It gives you enough grip and leverage to loosen the filter before finishing the job by hand.

That tool also helped solve a problem I had been fighting for years on my Ferris zero-turn mower. The mower has a Briggs & Stratton engine, and the oil filter sits in a tight, awkward place. From the way the frame is laid out, it feels as though the machine was originally designed around a different engine configuration. The oil access and drain do not line up cleanly with the space around them.

Changing the oil is still a process. I put the mower on a jack and tilt it. I line the frame with towels because I know oil will spill when the filter comes off, even after I have drained the engine. I move wiring harnesses out of the way so I do not scrape my hand and arm while reaching into the narrow space. Then I use the spider-shaped wrench to break the filter loose and finish removing it by hand.

The tool made the job much better. It did not make the rest of the job disappear.

That distinction matters.

We often treat the tool as though it is the solution. We buy the mower, the Gator, the wrench, the software, or the AI subscription and expect the problem to be handled. But even a great tool only changes what is possible. It still has to fit into a process. Someone has to understand the job, prepare the workspace, recognize what can go wrong, and take responsibility for the result.

The little oil-filter wrench did not learn where the wiring harness sits. It did not know the mower needed to be tilted or that the frame should be covered with towels. It did not decide how much force was enough or when it was time to stop. It solved one difficult part of a larger job.

That is still valuable. In fact, that is exactly what a good tool should do.

The right tool gives us leverage. Experience teaches us where that leverage belongs.

This is true around the acreage, and it is true in most of the work I have done in technology. Good tools can save time, reduce frustration, and make work possible that would otherwise be impractical. They can help us move faster and avoid repeating the same painful mistakes. But they do not remove judgment, preparation, maintenance, or ownership.

I still expect to get a little dirty when I change the oil. I still plan for the spill, move the harnesses, and finish the filter by hand. I just do not expect to spend five hours fighting the same piece of equipment anymore.

The tool does not do the work. It helps a person who understands the work do it better.

That is a much more realistic promise, and usually a much more useful one.

A 1999 bedroom with a CRT computer, blue guitar, baseball glove, George Brett poster, and Ticket Solutions handbook.

Plans Change

JakeLeave a comment

The path was never straight. The pattern underneath it was.

For most of my childhood, I thought I had a plan.

I would go to the University of Missouri, study communications or journalism, and find a life somewhere around writing. There was also a version of the plan where I became a professional baseball player and followed George Brett all the way to Cooperstown. I was a pretty good ballplayer. I was not remotely that good. Childhood plans do not always concern themselves with evidence.

Then, when I was twelve, a kid brought a guitar to summer camp. He played Sweet Child O’ Mine, the girls gathered around, and I decided I would return the next summer with a guitar of my own. That plan did not work either. I found my mom’s old guitar in the basement, took lessons, learned Smoke on the Water and the theme from Spy Hunter, and arrived at camp nowhere near ready to sweep anyone off her feet.

But I kept playing. I formed a hard rock band when I was fourteen. We wrote songs, won a battle of the bands, played a few shows, and recorded a demo tape. Before I turned eighteen, I had been pushed out of the band I started.

Plans change.

After high school, I took college classes in writing, music theory, and movies. Maybe I would become a screenwriter. Then my father died in the spring of 1996. I was eighteen. He was fifty. School stopped feeling important, my grades fell apart, and whatever path I thought I was following disappeared beneath me.

I did not suddenly discover a perfect new plan. I looked for the next thing that still seemed possible.

Computers had been part of my life since I was around ten, but I had never treated them like a career. They were where I tinkered. They were fun. When almost everything else at school was going badly, I took classes in Microsoft Office and Visual Basic and made a couple of B’s with the same effort that had been producing D’s and F’s elsewhere. I remember thinking, I might be onto something here.

Then I met Java.

Object-oriented programming changed the way I saw the world. I could picture software spatially. Data had shape. Systems had relationships. Algorithms stopped feeling like a list of instructions I had to drag myself through and started feeling like structures I could walk around inside. For the first time, something clicked in a way I could not ignore.

That did not make the road easy. During the dot-com boom, companies wanted experience or a diploma and I had neither. I fixed computers under the name Compu-Doc and chased programming, hardware, networking, and even Unix work. Before one interview, I bought Unix for Dummies and read it in the parking lot. The company liked me, but suggested I volunteer to get experience. I had bills to pay, so I declined.

In 1999, I made another plan. I would leave my job, move back to my hometown, buy a house, and complete a three-year Computer Information Systems program. This time I was an A student. I made the Dean’s List nearly every trimester and was on track to graduate Magna Cum Laude. I imagined landing on a Java team at a large engineering company. It felt like the plan had finally settled down.

Two trimesters before graduation, two friends kept trying to recruit me into a small ticket company. I kept saying no. I did not know what a ticket broker was, and it did not look like the future I had pictured. Then the dot-com bubble burst. Graduates who had expected strong development jobs were finding help desk work or nothing at all. I got nervous, called my friends, and asked whether the opportunity was still there.

I walked into the interview and told the owner that hiring me would be one of the best decisions he ever made. I asked for more money than my friends were making and promised I would be worth it. I also told him I could only work thirty hours a week until I finished school.

He hired me.

If my memory is right, I started July 16, 2001. Nearly everyone who knew I was coming was away at a conference. I found a spare computer, built it into something I could use, introduced myself to people, asked what they needed, and started solving a problem.

That part has repeated through most of my career. The title changed. The company changed. The industry changed. The plan changed more times than I can count. Sometimes I stayed too long. Sometimes I bet on people who did not bet on me in the same way. Sometimes loyalty opened a door, and sometimes it kept me standing in a room after I should have left. There were successes, disappointments, promotions, sales, new teams, side businesses, and several moments when I was sure I was finally about to follow the clean path forward.

There was never a clean path.

What I can see now is that the plans were never the most consistent part of the story. The pattern underneath them was.

I build. I solve problems. I walk into unclear situations, find the pieces, and try to make them work together. I did it with computers as a kid, with music as a teenager, with software in the ticket industry, with data and automation across other businesses, and eventually with Transcendent Software, CoffeeBreak, and Open Jibo Cloud.

That does not mean every turn was the right one. Adaptation is not the same as wisdom, and persistence is not always the same as progress. Part of getting older is learning that finding a way forward also means deciding what should not come with you.

Today, I am betting on myself again. The plan is different from the one I had at twelve, eighteen, twenty-three, or even a few years ago. It will probably change again. I hope it does. A plan that never changes is usually a plan that has stopped listening to reality.

The goal is not to find my way back to an old plan. It is to find my way back to the part of me that knew what to do before the titles, expectations, and detours made everything complicated.

Find the problem. Build something useful. Keep going.

Plans change. The work continues.

Friendly desktop robot beside a laptop showing three AI collaborator profiles, with notes for self-hosted, hybrid, and managed rollout paths on a desk.

Building for Everyone Without Rushing the Door Open

JakeLeave a comment

I posted two videos recently that probably look like they are about different things.

One is a CoffeeBreak demo showing Persona. In that video, I walked through Atlas, Mara, and Sol, three different AI collaborators that all use the same underlying intelligence but respond in different ways. Atlas thinks like a systems person. Mara explains things in plain language. Sol can bridge between simple explanation and technical handoff.

The other video is about Open Jibo Cloud version 1.0.20. That one is more personal in a different way. It shows Jibo connected to the first public cloud node, responding faster, remembering my name, answering questions, playing “Word of the Day,” setting timers, dancing, and generally feeling a little more alive again.

On the surface, those are two very different projects.

One is an AI orchestration platform I am building for real work.

The other is a community effort to bring back a little robot that a lot of people still care about.

But in my head, they are connected.

They are both about making technology fit people.

That sounds simple, but it is where a lot of technology goes sideways. We build something powerful and then expect people to bend themselves around it. We give everyone the same interface, the same assumptions, the same workflow, the same level of technical complexity, and then we wonder why only a small group of people ever really benefit from it.

That is one of the reasons Persona matters to me.

I do not think AI should always sound like the same generic assistant. I do not think every person needs the same explanation. I do not think a founder, a developer, an operator, a designer, and a business owner should all have to interact with intelligence in the same way.

In the demo, I showed a simple example. Ask the same question to three personas and you get three different kinds of help. Then give them memory, and the answers start to become more grounded. Then give them behavioral direction, and the system starts adapting not just what it knows, but how it helps.

Atlas can give the code.

Mara can keep it non-technical.

Sol can explain it first and then hand over the technical version.

That is not just a tone change. That is the beginning of a system that respects the person on the other side of the screen.

The Open Jibo Cloud work is teaching the same lesson from a different angle.

There are people in the Jibo community who are very technical. They want to self-host. They want to run their own cloud on a computer or Raspberry Pi near their robot. They want control, and they are comfortable with setup.

There are other people who want a hybrid model. They may want to connect to a broader network, get access to shared skills, keep some portability, and still have some control over how their Jibo runs.

And then there are people who just want Jibo to work again.

They do not want to become cloud engineers. They do not want to read through configuration files. They do not want to understand every part of the stack. They just want the robot they loved to be able to find its server, hear them, respond, and feel like Jibo again.

All of those people matter.

That is why the public cloud milestone is exciting, but it is also why I keep talking about doing it responsibly. Standing up a public cloud is not just a technical accomplishment. It is a responsibility. Once something is public, other people start depending on it. Security matters. Reliability matters. Upgrade paths matter. Participation matters.

If the goal is for Open Jibo to be for everyone, then “everyone” has to include the tinkerers, the contributors, the self-hosters, the people who want managed cloud, and the people who are still deciding if they want to bring their Jibo back online at all.

That takes longer.

It is tempting to rush the door open when something starts working. I feel that temptation all the time. The demo works. The cloud responds. The robot dances. The AI remembers. The product starts to make sense.

But working once is not the same thing as being ready for everyone.

That has become one of the bigger lessons in this season of building.

Good technology is not just about proving that something is possible. It is about making the possible useful. It is about making it understandable. It is about choosing the right level of access, the right level of control, and the right amount of guidance for the people who will actually use it.

That is true for AI.

That is true for Jibo.

That is true for most of the systems we depend on.

I want CoffeeBreak to help people work with AI in a way that feels like it fits them, not like they are borrowing someone else’s idea of intelligence.

I want Open Jibo Cloud to bring Jibo back in a way that makes room for the whole community, not just the people who already know how to run the infrastructure.

And I want to keep building in a way that remembers the person on the other side of the system.

I have spent my career doing just that.

And honestly, this feels like the right time and place to be me.

If you want to check out the videos, here are the links:

A notebook and pencil on a weathered fence post beside a mowed path through rural grass in soft morning light.

The Next Decision

JakeLeave a comment

There are days when the list is too big to be useful.

The land needs work. The house has things waiting. The business has things waiting. The writing has things waiting. Jibo has things waiting. There are ideas I want to build, things I want to fix, people I want to spend more time with, and more half-finished thoughts than I can reasonably hold in my head at once.

When I look at all of it at the same time, it can feel like standing in the middle of the yard after a storm.

Everything is visible. Nothing is obvious.

That is usually the moment when I have to stop trying to solve the whole thing.

The better question is much smaller:

What is the next decision?

Not the next perfect plan. Not the whole roadmap. Not the five-year strategy. Just the next decision that makes movement possible again.

Sometimes that decision is practical. Mow this section first. Fix this one thing before touching the next one. Get the basic version working before making it clever.

Sometimes it is personal. Put the work down for a while. Be present. Let the unfinished things stay unfinished until tomorrow.

Sometimes it is creative. Write the rough version. Record the imperfect video. Get the idea out where it can breathe.

I have noticed that a lot of stuck things are not stuck because they are impossible. They are stuck because the next decision is hidden.

It is buried under too many options, too many obligations, too much context, or too much pressure to make the “right” move.

Building Transcendent Software full time has made that more obvious. There is always more I could do. More content. More outreach. More product work. More website updates. More CoffeeBreak thinking. More Open Jibo work. More client conversations. More internal systems.

But the answer cannot always be “do more.”

A lot of the time, the answer is to make the next decision visible enough that I can act on it.

That is one of the things I like about working on Jibo again. When he does something small correctly, it feels good. A greeting works. A weather response works. A behavior feels a little more alive than it did before.

But under that small visible moment is a chain of decisions.

What did he hear?
What did it mean?
What context matters?
What should happen next?
When should the system keep going?
When should it stop?
When should a human be involved?

That is true in software, but it is also true in life.

A good system does not remove every hard decision. It helps make the next one clearer.

I think that is what I am trying to build right now, across a lot of different parts of life.

A business that can keep moving without pretending everything is figured out.

A writing rhythm that can survive imperfect weeks.

A product vision that grows from real problems instead of hype.

A family life that does not get swallowed by the work.

A revived little robot that still has something to teach.

None of that happens all at once.

It happens one visible decision at a time.

So today, that is the frame I am carrying with me.

When the list gets too big, make the next decision visible.

Then move.

Still building. More to come. ☕

Above-ground backyard pool set up on a sunny summer day with floats, grass, fence, and trees in the background.

The Things That Keep Moving

JakeLeave a comment

There are always more things to do than there is day to hold them.

Accepting this reality has been one of the stranger lessons of this season of my life.

Building Transcendent Software, taking care of our property, keeping up with the Jibo Revival Group and everything happening there, writing, thinking through CoffeeBreak and the products I want to launch inside of it, helping clients, staying present for the people around me, and most importantly, making time for family and friends.

None of it lines up neatly.
None of it waits its turn.
It all seems to need something at the same time.

It is easy to look at all of that chaos and feel like unfinished work means failure. But I am trying to learn a different lesson.

Some things do not need to be finished today. They need to keep moving.

That sounds simple, but it is a hard lesson for me. I cannot stand when things are unfinished. They sit in the back of my mind and eat at me. Accepting this changes the way I think about progress.

A little work on the land still matters. A small improvement to Jibo still matters. A conversation with a client still matters. A post written on a Sunday still matters. A quiet evening with family still matters.

Not everything has to become a big push. Not everything needs a dramatic finish. Sometimes the job is to keep enough of the right things alive that they can keep growing.

Yesterday was a good example.

I spent most of the day setting up our backyard pool. It is a small above-ground pool that I set up each year. It was hot out. I got too much sun. The pool is up now, hopefully leak free, and maybe I will actually get to enjoy it later today.

I made that pool my quest yesterday.

So much so that by the time my son wanted me to get in, I could not do it. I just did not have it in me. I had pushed and pushed to get it done.

You might be thinking, why didn’t I set the pool up a month and a half ago when most people were setting up their pools?

Because I cannot stand unfinished projects.

I knew that if I started it, I had too much going on and would not be able to finish it. So I avoided starting it at all. That is exactly the problem I am writing about. I need to be okay with making progress. It does not have to be all or nothing.

We might have been swimming for weeks now, but instead I chose to work on other unfinished things in hopes of getting them done. The funny thing is, they are all still in progress too.

And the reality is that the pool is in progress until I tear it down at the end of the season anyway. There will be maintenance. Water levels. Chemicals. Leaks to patch. Inflatables to inflate. Things to check. Things to fix.

That is the part I keep having to relearn.

These truths are true no matter the situation and no matter the stakes.

True in a garden.
True with old machines.
True with kids.
True with software.
And really, true with most things worth building.

The hard part is rhythm.

A rhythm is different from a perfect schedule. A schedule assumes the day will behave. A rhythm assumes it probably will not. A rhythm gives you a way back in.

Miss a day, come back. Get interrupted, pick up the thread. Make a little progress, then let it compound. Stop pretending every unfinished thing is proof that you are behind.

I do not have this mastered. Not even close. But I can feel the shape of it becoming more important.

I do not want a life where every good thing depends on one heroic sprint after another. I want a life where the important things keep moving, even when the week is messy.

That is what I am trying to build right now.

A business that keeps moving.
A family rhythm that keeps moving.
Projects that keep moving.
Old ideas that still have life in them.
New ideas that need patience.
Systems that can survive imperfect weeks.

Maybe that is the work.

Not finishing everything.

Keeping the right things moving.

A quiet backyard after a Fourth of July party, with chairs, decorations, and morning light suggesting celebration and cleanup.

After the Fireworks

JakeLeave a comment

I meant to write this before the weekend.

That was the plan, anyway. Sunday is supposed to be blog day. I had the idea. I had the theme. I had the intention.

Then life happened. Good life, but life.

On Saturday we hosted a party for the 250th birthday of the United States. It was spectacular. Friends came over. People pitched in. There was food, setup, decorating, cooking, cleaning, kids running around, conversation, and one of those nights where the work fades into the background for a little while and you just get to be grateful that everyone is there.

And the fireworks were great.

There is something about fireworks that still gets me. You know they are planned. You know someone bought them, set them up, thought through the timing, watched the conditions, and made sure everyone was standing far enough back. But when they go off, you stop thinking about all that for a moment.

You just look up.

That feels about right for the 250th birthday of the country too.

Freedom can become an abstract word if we are not careful. It is easy to turn it into slogans or arguments or the kind of thing people only talk about when they are already mad.

But freedom is also very practical.

It is the ability to gather with friends in your own yard. To cook food. To let kids run around. To build a life. To disagree and still share a table. To work hard for something that is not required, but is worth doing anyway.

A good party does not happen by accident. Neither does a good life. Neither does a free country.

There is the visible part everyone remembers. The lights. The food. The music. The laughter. The fireworks.

Then there is the part underneath.

The planning. The mowing. The hauling. The setup. The dishes. The trash. The things that have to be moved, fixed, carried, cleaned, and checked before anyone arrives. There are the real challenges of storms blowing through and power going out just hours before the party starts.

And then there is the morning after.

That might have been the part that stuck with me most this year. Not because cleanup is glamorous, because it is not. But because a few people came back and helped us clean up. Friends pitched in before, during, and after.

That is a small thing, but it is not a small thing.

A lot of what matters in life is held together that way. Not by one person doing everything. Not by the big speech or the big show. But by people noticing what needs to be done and doing some of it.

That is easy to miss if you only look at the fireworks.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the work behind the moment. The patience behind the celebration. The maintenance behind the freedom. The cleanup after the party, even if the sun beat down and fatigue set in.

Maybe that is why posting this late does not bother me as much as it might have a few years ago.

Before the weekend, this would have been a post about anticipation. About what the 250th meant before the fireworks went up.

After the weekend, it feels more honest.

The lesson was not just in the celebration.

It was in the setup.

It was in the people who helped.

It was in the cleanup.

It was in the reminder that the things worth celebrating usually require the most care after the big moment passes.

And maybe that is a pretty good lesson for a country turning 250.

Freedom is not only something we inherit. It is something we keep making room for, keep cleaning up after, keep choosing to protect, and keep practicing in ordinary ways with ordinary people.

Saturday night was spectacular.

Sunday morning was quieter.

Both mattered.