Thursday, 5th February 2026
Back to Blogging
I’m picking up blogging again after a long pause.
I missed the slower, more thoughtful pace of writing in public — and I’d like to make some new friends online along the way. This space will be for ideas I’m exploring, notes on building things, and the occasional reflection.
If you’re reading this, feel free to say hi. I’m glad to be back.
Planning to try the clawbot after work today. In my setting I would like to use it to help me manage my social network, catch up with my friends, so I can have more time to focus on my own stuff...
This past June, MIT researchers published findings that seemed to explain what we’re experiencing. They scanned the brains of 54 students writing essays under three conditions: using only ChatGPT, using only Google, or using just their own thinking.
The results seemed damning. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural activity, and 83 percent couldn’t remember what they’d written, compared to just 11 percent in the other groups. “Is ChatGPT making us stupid?,” the headlines asked.
But buried in the study was a finding most coverage missed. The researchers also tested what happens when you sequence your AI use differently. Some participants thought first, then used AI (brain → AI). Others used AI first, then switched to thinking (AI → brain).
The brain → AI group showed better attention, planning, and memory even while using AI. Remarkably, their cognitive engagement stayed as high as students who never used AI. The researchers suggest this increased engagement came from integrating AI’s suggestions with the internal framework they’d already built through independent thinking.
— Think First, AI Second, By Ines Lee
Auth Problem Looked Bigger Than It Was
I spent most of this afternoon deep in the weeds designing an auth bridge between an existing cluster of servers and a new service used by the same clients base across the servers. The initial conversations went straight to the “big” answers—Cognito, full OAuth flows, external identity plumbing everywhere—and for a while it felt like the only responsible path was also the most complex one.
Then, after nearly two hours, I realized what we really needed was a trusted issuer and a trusted verifier. We can use the existing platform to issue JWT bearer tokens from our user/client model, sign them with private keys we control, and let the new service verify them with public keys while enforcing claims like issuer, audience, scope, subject, and expiry.
Suddenly the design felt natural: no per-request callback to the issuer, no unnecessary moving parts, and clean attribution of every service call to a known user and client for metering and audit.
A good reminder that “production-grade” doesn’t always mean “maximal complexity”—sometimes the strongest design is the one that makes trust boundaries explicit and keeps the system understandable.
Bedtime Reading—Pi: The Minimal Agent Within OpenClaw. :
Takeaway: a malleable, self-customizing agent stack where minimal primitives + code execution outperform overly complex agent frameworks for many real workflows