Daily log

If you token max, don’t forget to allocate 20-25% of your time towards manual creative outputs. Otherwise, you’ll brain rot -> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S294988212500091X

Today I’m inventing v0 of a Junastar deck and prepping for Founders Day this Thursday. Which means practicing what I just preached.

My process: brief first, always. Then pen and paper for the first draft. That’s where the story, the emotion, the flow, and the “what the hell is this thing” anyways gets figured out . Only then do I bring in Claude design systems for a first version, and finish in Figma Slides.

Doing it this way forces me to deeply understand the topic and the nuances between pages and the audience. When I skip straight to whatever Claude or ChatGPT pumps out, it clouds my judgement, intuition, and my idea antenna. Same as teaching. You don’t really know a topic until you’ve had to write or present it yourself. Reps build the clarity, confidence, and user empathy. You know the thing cold, and the audience can feel it.

TLDR don’t skip creative writing days or that morning pages routine.

• Refactored a personal project. Wading through an old Figma file hits differently. The goal is to actually build the iOS MVP in September.
• Refactored this website with a dozen design improvements. The experiment of working without Figma is over, or at least going hybrid. I still haven’t cracked how to make design passable without a design tool, at least to my own bar, and I know it’s something I need to work on. There’s a misconception that teams are shipping great work without Figma or Paper. Maybe for 80% quality. Anything that needs to be 90 to 100% isn’t happening freehand from command line.
• Experimenting, and so far failing, with larger context management projects. Talked to a few other builders this week. Everyone is struggling with this.
• The plan is to keep tightening this site without a huge overhaul. I suspect I’ll end up there anyway: waking up mid-Sept saying yuck, and starting over. In the meantime, focusing on different types of AI reps, processes, and agent trees to find what I like best.
• While everyone is tokenmaxxing and trying to increase surface area, I’m reducing mine. Going deeper with a stronger foundation, higher quality. Red hot coals versus spray and pray fleeting flames.
• Captured 2 KOMs this morning, attaching a video below

funny thing, soo most of my interactions with this website happen from terminal now, not the browser. was planning to carve out three or four days in september for a proper refresh but going to start chipping away at it today instead and see how far I get in the next 24 hours

unrelated. my friends golden says hi

PSA your company or product website is your source of truth. While you may have a brand new launch or product or thousands of pages sitting within Google Docs, Notion, Obsidian, etc What the world knows about you is what is available to the internet eye. It’s even more important in an agentic world That scrapes your website, misses nuance, and has 10 other parallel agents checking potential competitors. Ensure your website is up to date. And lean into what makes you a unique snowflake!

wrapped a few major Health and fitness milestones with 3 PBs. chatting with a few different founders. August is shaping up to be token-heavy, which feels like a dangerous metric and rather meaningless. excited to share a slew of new ships and text on where I think we’re headed next.

biggest struggle atm is what or how much to share in public.

starting a new repo for a quick n dirty new kenny.is website. messing around with some new models, and have this playing in the background

pushing this post as i’m restarting ai outputs after an extended break (sick).

one topic i’ve been exploring is how to think different… how models are predictable and those that are ai pilled have offloaded deep thinking to the models, to blindly march toward reinforcement completion.

new company perks:

• quarterly flower budget
• home depot renovation budget
• mattress, bedding, and blackout blinds budget
• yearly thrift books budget
• offsites with no laptops or tokens
• classes on cooking, gardening, and home renovation
• classes on being human: emotions, conflict, relationships, love, somatic experiences

Scotland kickoff in 2.5 hours and i’m cramming on a few experiments with figma and claude design systems.

A long time mentor/friend shared this video after we had a lengthy discussion on scorecards and comparison.

Another friend from Singapore launched a new biz focusing on helping founders grow calmly versus growth at all costs. They just received new business cards, and I love seeing friends launching and chasing new ventures. Happy friday.. gooo Scotland!

Vision questing, ideagazing, and deep work happen best off grid in minimal designed + low resting heart destinations. 35k feet is my ideal place for deep work, but i’m not flying anywhere to reach that peak state. i’m just over in west vancouver. A few quotes circled from journal.

You have to be a bad actor, and see them, before you can become a good one.

Everyone is a flower grower

Vancouver is world cup cray at the moment. Today, i’m teeing up a 2 week sprint to close out the q. Working on a new design system with claude for a new brand. Following that, spending a few hours tidying up this website css/styling/design love

starting a new dicovery collective called junastar! i’d rather show than tell… but things hit the feels and became real once that red starburst certificate of incorp hits your inbox. Mucho excitement.

new energy.. so for today i’ll start cleaning up my digital house (this website), figma reps + some design cycles + write a newsletter draft.

creative maps only take you so far

feel your way

Re - acting and the creative act

“total immersion into possibility. It’s infinitely interesting, there’s no bottom to it. A lot of it just great, deep, belief”

8:28 is like flying

ahh, already feeling soo much better about wispr flow