A House to Live In
The Keys
Recently I built a house for a guy named Bob.
Not a real house. Bob is a little AI agent, and not a real guy either. I put him together one evening while I was running errands and doing stuff around my home, talking to my phone. He carried context from one conversation to the next, booted up wearing different personalities, and handed his memory forward like a genetic mutation. I named him after We Are Legion (We Are Bob), the first book in the Bobiverse series, where a software guy’s mind gets uploaded into a spacecraft and copies itself across the galaxy, each copy drifting a little from the last. That is exactly what mine did. I even thought about open sourcing him.
I’d thought of the better version before he was even finished, and a few weeks later I built that one instead. He went in the drawer with the rest of them. And I have not seen Bob since.
That’s the whole thing about me. I love building things, and then I love building the next thing. The better version always shows up before I’ve even used the last one.
Now I have a crew of agents for my development work, named after the crew of the Rocinante from The Expanse. Holden, Amos, Naomi, and Alex are all in there. There’s a Fred Johnson now too, if you know you know. The latest is a family coordinator I named Skippy, after the beer-can-shaped AI with a god complex from the Expeditionary Force series. Yes, I’m a sci-fi geek. I named my dog after a video game character, too.
Before the agents it was twenty years of software. Before the software it was Legos on the floor as a kid.
And the Legos are the tell. I’d build the thing on the box, study it, get it exactly right, and then I’d take it apart and build something else. The finished castle was never the point. Solving it was the point. The second the puzzle is done, my brain is already somewhere else.
I am very good at building houses for other people. I build it and hand over the keys, and walk to the next site. It’s not a tragedy. It’s a career. I created most of a company’s technology once and it made a fortune. I’ve told that one already. I build systems at work. I build little applications for my household, for my family, sometimes for my friends. When someone has a problem to solve, I build.
And here’s the part I won’t pretend isn’t true: I love it. Building for other people is a really great feeling, at least for someone like me. You solve someone’s problem, you watch the thing actually help them, you get to see it land. I’ll do it for anybody who asks. I just don’t do it for me. It’s like how a person will drive the dog to the vet and fill every prescription on time and never once schedule their own checkup. The care goes outward. It’s just more rewarding out there.
But there’s one house in particular you can never hand off to another person.
It’s the one house you don’t get to leave. No keys to pass along, no walking to the next site. So for a long time I just didn’t build it. The house I kept refusing to live in was me.
I give myself away before I get around to myself. Always have. I’ll drop what I’m doing to build something for anyone who asks, which sounds generous right up until you’re the person standing next to me wondering where you rank. When you’ll build for everybody, the people closest to you can have a hard time feeling like the priority. That isn’t on them. That’s the math of a guy who’d rather pour a foundation than sit still inside one.
The story could end right here, and you could file it under sad. The guy who built everyone’s house and never lived in one. That’s the version I had in mind when I started writing this. For a long time it’s how I told it to myself. It just isn’t true anymore. It’s hard to keep complaining about a thing while you’re busy building the next version of it.
Because somewhere in the last few years I found the workaround, and it’s stupidly simple. I stopped trying to finish things. I build a thing, I launch it before it’s ready, and then I keep building it while I use it. That’s it. Turns out the only house you ever live in is the one you never stop building. The using and the building stop being two different jobs.
This newsletter is the clearest one. I have exactly two ways to ruin a project: walk away from it, or improve it forever and never let it out the door. The newsletter won’t allow either. Every week it makes me put something down that isn’t finished, and I’m sure it could be better, and then I release it anyway. No abandoning it. No polishing it into the ground. I write it, I let it go, and somehow that’s the most at home I’ve felt in anything I’ve made.
I’m not even sure what I’m building, honestly. It’s less of a product and more of a place. Somewhere I get to think out loud and create and watch the thing take on a life of its own. One that I didn’t really plan. Every one of these stories comes out differently than the version I had in my head.
There’s one more thing I’ve gotten wrong for years. I never keep any of the value for myself. I’ve spent a career building things other people got to own. Build a house for someone else and they get what it produces. Build one for yourself and you keep what it makes. I’m finally letting myself change that. There’s a whole story in the money part that I’m not ready to tell yet.
I started this story as an account of everything I’ve given away. It turned into the first thing I’m keeping.
So look at whatever it may be that you keep building for everyone aside from yourself. The system you’d set up for a friend in an afternoon and have never once run on your own life. You don’t have to finish it. You just have to stay. Build it badly, use it anyway, and keep building it from the inside.
I’ve spent my life building things and handing over the keys. And now I’m building a place where I’m actually going to be living.
Finally.
Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.