One new roof
This is a fresh experiment: everything I love, brought together under one new roof.
After thirty years of building places, companies and communities, and a lifetime of making music, I’m putting myself out into the world again, in a different way. Part of me still doesn’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up. The fire is still burning.
The questions are everyone’s now. Where is AI going? Will it take your work? We’re moving into an age where each of us has to do something more, and that something has to be precious and worthwhile, something a machine can’t do by itself. This doesn’t have to be a scary time. Done well, it may be the most beautiful time we’ve had.
So I’m starting from warmth. First you light a fire. Around it you lay a floor, then walls and a roof, then rooms. That’s a house. It becomes a home when your life moves in. A hearth is that for your work: your own fire at the centre, each thing you’re making a room around it, and an AI that knows it all sitting there with you. The tools come after the warmth, and they make things possible that weren’t possible before.
It’s about time
For thirty years we’ve used our computers the same way: email, spreadsheets, Adobe, a browser full of tabs. It has become repetitive and dull, and it doesn’t have to be.
We’ve lived inside other people’s systems because nobody gave us the chance to build our own. That has changed. You can now make your own apps and your own interface, shaped around the way you live and work.
The usual chat window isn’t a creative surface, so we stepped out of it and made our own. This is how I work now. It’s a new way of engaging creatively with technology, and a chance to take back our sovereignty. If we want a more harmonious relationship with our devices, we have to be creative with them. That’s what a hearth is for: it lights the fire.
Building by ear, learning by heart
Building by ear. Learning by heart. Making art for the earth. That’s the whole method.
People call this vibe coding. I don’t think it’s coding at all. Code is the timber and the concrete: it matters, but it isn’t the work. The work is knowing what should exist, imagining what could, and shaping it so that the feeling you began with reaches the person at the other end.
Musicians who play without a score say they play by ear: you listen, you try, you listen again, and the thing comes into tune. That is the transmission. Everything here was made that way, by a person and an AI working side by side, often in an afternoon, with no team.
I’m not a software developer, but in many ways I am a master builder, and I’ve been a musician for more than forty years. Whether a computer can carry music the way a violin does is an open question I’m trying to figure out.
From the heart
Look at the words inside hearth. Hear. Heart. Earth. Art. Heat. None of them comes from the brain.
They’re one word at different scales: the fire in a room, the warmth in a chest, the planet we call home. The thinking can now be shared with a machine. That leaves us free to put our highest intelligence first: listening, the heart, the earth, art.
What touches the heart, we call beautiful. What’s truly beautiful has to be good for the earth. So that’s what I’m chasing here.
Where this goes
I don’t know yet, and that’s part of it.
There’s nothing to buy here. If something on this page speaks to you, an app you’ve been waiting years for, a hearth of your own, a place for your community to gather, I’d like to hear about it. People love what they helped to make.
How a fire spreads
It’s the intensity of a fire that transforms. Grow deeper before you grow wider.
A wide, thin fire goes out. A small, hot one turns wood into coal, and one coal can light a village. Communities and companies work the same way: what grows from a real centre holds together, and what spreads too fast crumbles.
Why deeper comes first
Trust can’t be scaled, only earned, and people love what they helped to make. Going deep with a few people teaches you what no amount of reach can, and it gives the fire something real to pass on. One flame lights another, and the first burns no less for it.
Your five, your fifteen, your forty-five
We become the five people we spend the most time with. Around them is a tribe of fifteen, and around that the forty-five who could become your village. A venture grows well when each of those circles is real before the next one opens.
The two places where growth stalls
An old law of octaves says growth runs freely, then narrows twice, at the same places a musical scale does. At each one it fades or bends off course unless something comes from outside. The first shock is a real project, a stranger, a hard truth. The second comes later, when the founders let go and a new fire begins.
Four quarters, turning
Fuel is being: trust, care, space with no agenda. The engine is doing: love needs a project. The dashboard is measuring, in time and in every form of capital. The experience is what we make and offer, and it feeds the fire again.
The community around this work lives in CommonUnity.
Come and sit by my fire
I like to work with people I like. If you came to my home, we’d sit in the kitchen. Here, we sit by the fire.
A conversation, and we’ll see what connection we’ve got going on.