David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is widely praised for its insight and depth. It challenges readers to rethink something as everyday as eating lobster. The essay made me stop and think about two important ideas that I thought deserve more attention. First, the assumption that a lobster’s attempt to escape equates to the human concept of suffering and second, the larger reality of the food chain and circle of life.

I wanted to build a playlist around a specific vibe but couldn’t quite name it. Songs like Kurt Vile’s “Check Baby” and Mark Lanegan’s “Hit the City” captured a laid-back and unhurried aesthetic. Not slacker enough to be lazy but not energetic enough to be gym playlist material either. Just effortlessly cool. Searching by genre or artist for similar songs wasn’t cutting it. The usual categories returned were too broad and thus too vague. So I decided to use AI to help me find every song in my 2,500+ track library that matched this idea of an aesthetic.

Last night I built a full-stack web application in under ten hours. I’m not a software engineer and have near zero development experience, yet I shipped a tool that collects meeting inputs through a simple form, pulls details from internal directory and calendar APIs, formats a brief, and emails it to the intended recipients. In a large company, these types of tasks are usually a time sink for busy mid-level employees. I got the job done in a single extended evening using Cline inside VS Code for orchestration, Harmony for the app framework, and JDK 17 for the runtime. I also used MCP, the Model Context Protocol that lets an AI agent securely connect to tools, files, and services without hard-coding every integration.