Month: November 2025

I celebrated Thanksgiving with my family this weekend, with our big meal on Saturday evening. My immediate family converged on my parents’ home and the house I grew up in for the occasion. This timing was the result of two things, namely the work schedules of my brother and sister-in-law and the end of the modern firearm deer season in Kentucky.

We aren’t a family with deep Thanksgiving traditions. Dynamics and life seasons have meant shifts every couple of years to prevent any traditions taking root. To the extent there is such a tradition, it is that we have both turkey and ham as part of the Thanksgiving meal. There was also both a pie and a cake this year, and neither was chocolate so that I was able to partake in both. We can go ahead and make that a tradition if people would like, especially since my only contribution to the festivities was to be present.

This trip’s timing had a few advantages. For one thing, traffic was at normal levels so I made good time both going and coming. Second, I was able to stop and see my little cousins for a few hours on the way since they weren’t yet on a break from school. This benefit was much more important to me than the first. I arrived in time to have a few minutes with the youngest and then to greet the older ones as they got off the school bus. Now I have some new artwork with which to decorate my house and more positive memories with them. I did not, however, take any updated school pictures with me as the children looked rather too old in those pictures for my liking.

I cannot say it was a restful few days as I awoke early on two of the three mornings in order to be in a deer stand before daybreak, but it was a nice change to be amongst family and nature and to leave my computer off for a few days. That made for a chaotic Tuesday when I was back at work, but that was always going to be the case. Now it’s head down until Christmas week.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how some of the AI lessons I picked up at Rhodium would take up what I described as my “work free time.” Well, after procrastinating around setting things up, I finally entered the world of vibe coding this week. We’ve already built a few agents that we use for internal admin purposes, so I set out on a more ambitious project to build our first client-facing tool. It’s a brave new world when people like me now have access to tools that make me into a software developer.

In the space of about two and a half hours, with a kickstart boost from the leader of an AI community of which I’m a member, I had AI create a python script (complete with a desktop icon) to address a set of two discreet tasks that are part of our larger workflow of reviewing documents redlined by opposing counsel. The goal is to speed up an existing process. I’m not crazy enough to attempt to code myself out of a job. In that short amount of time, I created a beta version and produced a few outputs to facilitate internal discussions. This is still early days, but I may even show the output to a few clients who are attracted to the idea in the coming weeks to elicit feedback if people are open to the idea. There are going to be several opportunities coming up. As for development costs, they’re a rounding error even without me trying to be cost efficient.

Is the tool ready for primetime? No. Will it ever be a solution that could be offered as a standalone product? Probably not. Will I continue to iterate on it to make it functional for its narrow purpose? Absolutely. If I can save us 15-20 minutes each time we do something when we do that thing ~50 times a year then it’s worth spending a few hours to make that tool. And if I’m successful with this one, then I won’t stop at one.

If people want to tell me about some things they’ve automated with AI, I’m open to inspiration. It doesn’t even have to be something you vibe coded. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be work related. I know one guy who set up automations such that a text message to his wife gets drafted every morning when he leaves his house and all he has to do is approve and send it.

Sunday evening, I didn’t have curling due to ice maintenance. As this freed up my evening, I took my friend up on his invitation to join a group of people for dinner. Not that I actually responded to his text invitation, but whatever. It was shameful for me as I hadn’t responded the last time he had asked me to join this regularly scheduled outing when I had curling a few weeks prior. The reason was that he and his wife were expecting a baby very soon at that point and now I didn’t see a great way to ask how things were going. The last thing I wanted was to offer a reminder if something had gone seriously wrong. While I don’t think it was the easiest birth, nothing terrible actually happened and both baby and mother are healthy.

I’ve never been around a baby that young. The little guy wasn’t yet two weeks old and looked so tiny in his stroller setup. Even his brother, who is only about three years old himself, dwarfed him. He was sleeping so I didn’t dare touch the baby, but I could not help watching him. There is just something magical about new life like that. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I had to wake up every few hours to feed the newborn, but that’s not where I am in life.

After people ate, a few of us went outside the restaurant into a fenced area where the children can run around and play. The fascination of the evening was in seeing who could find the biggest stick to use in a futile attempt to fell a large tree. One child found such stick and the others became very upset when they were unable to find a similar stick. This one was the older brother of the newborn and a child I’ve gotten to know and who knows me now that we live in the same city, a child who indirectly influenced my own life when he was a baby in a stroller. His little world has changed forever, but he’ll adjust and be better for it.