This week I joined Every as a senior editor. I’ve been freelancing part-time there for over a year, editing essays (and in a couple of cases, fiction), and editing will continue to make up a majority of my work. I’ll also be writing my own occasional pieces like the two I shared in issues #454 and #452, and (and!) doing some light product work (which I’ll get to in a sec).
This all started a few years back when a mutual friend (👋 Linda) connected me with Dan Shipper, Every’s co-founder, to coach him on a manuscript. From there I picked up some freelance editing assignments, under the direction of editor-in-chief Kate Lee (formerly of Stripe Press and Medium), and from there, the energy of Every’s global 20+ person team charmed me even further.
One of Every’s big bets is that writers will thrive as AI becomes more enmeshed with our lives – that writing will be a foundational skill if not the foundational skill. Many engineers I know aren’t writing code anymore but they are writing prompts. And good writing gets harder when words are cheap.
These tools are radically changing software. It’s hard to understate this; I totally share Craig’s enthusiasm. If you don’t work in the field, you might’ve only had AI show up in your daily-use software in its sparkle-emoji forms: summaries, autocompletions, and the like, that it the biggest platforms and software makers are trying to shove down our throats.
But I suspect everyone will soon start to feel of the effects of how software is now being made. I’m most excited about what it means for the smaller projects that would otherwise get deprioritized. I’m excited about home-cooked apps and barefoot developers working in local communities, about the potential of long-abandoned projects rising from the dead.
I built Bebop on the first wave of AI copilot tools, and the latest models and coding agents make it feasible for me to maintain and actively develop it in my spare time. I finally, after almost a year of inactivity, pushed several new updates because the models are good enough that I can dip in between work on bigger, higher-priority projects (ie. manuscripts) and watching a one-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes while watching a one-and-a-half-year-old.
As I said at the top, part of my role at Every will include light product work, mainly on tools to improve the editorial workflow. Again, this would otherwise would be its own full-time job if the latest Opus and GPT models weren’t so damn good at code. Simply being able to ask a model, “What does this code do?” and get a near-immediate answer in plain english ... it’s hard to go back.
While sometimes I find myself in rooms where I’m the most optimistic about AI, other times I’m in rooms where I’m the most skeptical. I’m worried about the second- and third-order effects on computer jobs. I’m appalled (but also not surprised) at the recklessness at which the big players are skirting regulation and gobbling up copyrighted material without just compensation (See You in the Cosmos is one of the books in Anthropic’s pirated training set). I’m unsure about whether or not the short-term environmental costs, the staggering amounts of energy and water usage, will really be made up by hypothetical, AI-enabled future advances in clean energy and medicine.
But I also see benefit in staying abreast of these tools and understanding how they work – and how the work on us. Like everyone (even those who claim to know where this is all headed), I’m figuring it out as I go.
What this means, more practically, is that I don’t expect much else to change here (gestures vaguely at desk and website). I’ll continue working on children’s novels in my spare time (as OG Sunday readers might recall, I wrote my first novel on nights and weekends, and my subsequent novels have taken just as long as that first one). I’ll continue to maintain and update Bebop, and host digital mending circles and books clubs. I’ll continue teaching, visiting schools and libraries to talk with students, gardening and working on house projects and starting new hobbies and trying to improve my daily routines and processes.
So why now? Why, after more than a dozen years ticking off the “self-employed” box on forms have I taken a full-time job? My rational justification is that I’ve come to appreciate stability and predictability much more since Rufus was born, and come to realize how much I depend on external structure, whether someone else has set up that structure or I’ve set it up for myself.
But the real answer is that it just felt right.
One last thought (and maybe small prediction): These tools make it newly possible for anyone to venture out on their own, it’s true. Or at least becoming true. You can have AI do all the parts of the job that you yourself don’t enjoy doing or don’t have time to do. It’s never been easier to go solo. Which means it’s also never been easier to feel alone.
So: find your crew. It doesn’t have to look like a company. It could look like an artist collective, a coworking group, an eclectic research lab, a telegram thread with fellow alumni of an unconventional architecture program, a monthly podcast recording meet that persists even after you and your co-hosts have put the podcast on hiatus, or any other configuration of multiple human beings who share ideas and tools and knowledge, cheer each other on, and help each other make sense of what’s going on in wider world.
Jack