Tag: Gardening

  • A Bridge Between Soil and Silicon

    A Bridge Between Soil and Silicon

    Sometimes I feel caught between being an AI engineer and a gardener. A champion for sustainability. An artist who values what is made by hand. And then — for 40 (or let’s be real, more) hours a week — I am a software engineer.

    And yet… here we are.

    More and more, I’ve started to see myself not as divided, but as a bridge. A translator between two worlds. Someone fluent in both languages.

    I’m the kind of person who automates seed sowing and handwrites software architecture.

    Who raises a little girl among sage, nasturtium, and yarrow; teaching her to pattern-match leaves and stamens, to mix potions and ferment small treasures in glass jars; while I build systems that pattern-match embeddings and navigate vector databases.

    At first, this duality felt new.

    But when I look closer, I’ve always been this person.

    Someone who treasures naturopathy and herbal remedies, yet deeply respects modern medicine. Who has studied emergency care with one hand, and sought out acupuncture, ecstatic dance, and meditation with the other.

    I engineer software. I write stories. I plant seeds — both literally and metaphorically.

    I could sit in a Silicon Valley boardroom just as easily as I could disappear into a rural commune.

    I believe AI can transform our lives and support our work… all of it.

    But I also believe we must tread carefully, so it never replaces our spark. We can’t allow it to overwrite our creativity.

    So this is how I try to walk the line.

    I use AI as a collaborator, not a substitute. A thought partner, not a ghostwriter of my life.

    I still plant things from seed. I still write in notebooks. I still let boredom exist long enough for imagination to wake up.

    I want my daughter to grow up fluent in both ecosystems — the biological and the digital — and to know that neither should consume the other.

    I don’t think the future belongs to the people who choose one side.

    I think it belongs to the translators. The bridge-builders. The ones who can sit with both a seedling and a neural net and see continuity instead of contradiction.

    We’re going to need technologists who understand soil. Artists who understand systems. Parents who teach their children both how to grow food and how to question algorithms.

    Maybe you’re a bridge too.

    Maybe you code all day and knit at night. Or work in finance but dream in poetry. Maybe you’ve felt the same pressure to choose a lane.

    You don’t have to.

    The future needs people who can hold more than one world at once.

  • Digital Artisans

    Digital Artisans

    I think we are in a time of over indulgence in Generative AI. I’m sure that I have been, anyhow. I feel like I’ve been sitting at the table for too long, stuffing myself with quick wins and all kinds of things being created at the push of a button.

    For a while there, I could pick it. I could tell what what AI vs human writing. The signs were there (some still are). Em dashes, elaborate overuse of words like tapestry and testament, a general enthusiasm that humans don’t normally write with.

    But with each day that passes, it’s becoming more and more difficult to spot it.

    Recently I purchased some seeds (an understatement, recently I purchased many, many seeds from numerous different retailers across the country) Some arrived with beautiful pamphlets, care instructions, or QR codes to videos. But one struck me most – these ones from monarchs matter 4 seeds.

    A hand-addressed envelope, full of hand-written seed packets, butterfly stickers, and a cute little butterfly bag. It felt special and personal. More importantly? I could know and tell it was human made and put together, just for me.

    This got me thinking, which led to some questions…

    On the web – how can we tell the same? How will we know and appreciate artisanal hand written human content? How will we evolve to know that what we are consuming online is authentic, genuine, or perhaps special and personal?

    Are we going to take a turn back towards looking for tiny signals? Of valuing imperfections, spelling mistakes, and personal blogging styles that let us know more about where the content came from?

    What direction are we moving toward in order to sift through all the GenAI content and find the digital artisans?