It’s 6pm on a Friday and I’m sitting in the truck with my sunglasses on, letting the adrenaline drain while I talk into my phone. I just gave a talk I’ve been preparing for a month, maybe longer, and it was good. Better than good. Real.
I opened by saying, “This is not a talk about AI,” and meant it. It was a talk about us, how we resist new things, how we hide behind pretty output, and how we get unstuck by iterating out loud. I said all of that while my nervous system tried to convince me to flee the room. Public speaking is not my thing. But there’s a moment when the runway ends and you either lift or you don’t. I lifted, partly because I didn’t want to let Claudio down.
For weeks, he’s been meeting me every Thursday, carving time he did not owe me. He gives talks all the time; I do not. He brought a calm, lived-in preparation I didn’t know how to manufacture. We’d record our sessions, transcribe them, and shove the transcripts into an LLM to pull themes, questions, homework. He showed me how to turn a messy hour into a map. I learned to show up with clay, not marble.
Tonight we staged a small, honest problem from our world: logging involvement points. I played the person who isn’t sure where a talk like this belongs. Claudio took my words and typed them, vaguely, into AI Studio. It produced a vague solution. That contrast is the point. We gave the machine more context, user stories crafted in ChatGPT and pasted them back in. The second result landed with a thud lol. Underwhelming on a stage is not comfortable but in this case it was also authentic. You can feel a room lean in when the demo doesn’t obey you, because now we’re not performing, now we’re working.
We switched to a stronger version from a previous session so people could see what “refined” looked like. That opened the floodgates. Questions came from every side of the room: what makes a prompt “enough”? how do you measure outcome instead of counting lines of code? where do guardrails live? And then a question that hooked me behind the ribs: what about the environmental cost of all this? I didn’t have a neat answer. We should make space for those voices, and I need to give the question more of my time than a nod between slides. I’m grateful it came up, shoutout to Jake.
I can tell you the moment my body settled. I stopped trying to remember lines and started talking to people. The trembling eased. Claudio was the steady metronome he always is, cool as a cucumber, but also present, listening, asking better follow-ups than the ones I had prepared. It felt less like giving a talk and more like hosting a conversation we all wanted to have. We even ran out of time. There was a musical bit I was both dreading and excited about, and we never made it there but maybe next time.
Somewhere in the middle, I talked about the blank page. Resistance wears a lot of disguises, for me it looks like a blinking cursor. Claudio almost never faces a blank page because he doesn’t wait for inspiration he captures scraps. Voice notes during a walk. A photo of a whiteboard. A sentence that might be nothing, later turning into a hinge for something bigger. The first time he said it, I struggled with the idea. Tonight, I hope it resonated with everyone in the room. Even if you have nothing, you still have your voice. Talk it out. Transcribe. Shape. Voice breaks the silence.
If the talk had a thesis, it was this: output is code; outcome is trust. You can lint it, format it, test it to 100% coverage and still miss the human thing you were hired to move. Tools amplify intent. Sloppy in, sloppy faster. Disciplined in, disciplined at scale. None of that is a condemnation of the tools. It’s a challenge to us.
Afterwards, people came up to say that I looked nervous at first (I was) and then found a groove (I did). They gave me practical feedback, slow down here, skip that preface there and more importantly, they told me they saw themselves in the three faces of resistance I described: the skeptic who keeps us safe, the silent resistor who “tries” just enough to confirm a bias, and the curious collaborator who treats AI like a junior partner with clear intent and guardrails. I’ve worn all three faces.
On the drive home I replayed the gap between me minutes before the presentation, pacing in and out with a can of ginger ale and me taking questions without a script. Preparation helped. But not the cram every fact kind. The ordinary, weekly practice of making, recording, transcribing, and refining. The decision to show the messy version on stage. The permission to say “I don’t know” when the hardest question in the room deserved more than a defensible take.
I also thought about gratitude. Claudio pushed me when I said I was afraid of public speaking. He refused to let the fear be the headline. He gave me a process when I wanted to stall and met me every Thursday until I believed I could carry a room.
I started the day telling a room this wasn’t a talk about AI. It was a talk about us, about choosing outcome over output, collaboration over performance, and doing the difficult thing until it stops feeling like a cliff. I drove away feeling like a better version of myself, not because I nailed every beat, but because I did the thing I said was hard. I want more of that. More hard things, chopped down to size. More rooms where the demo misbehaves and the conversation gets honest. More Thursdays with people who make me braver.
I’m an Improver, and improving is what we do.
- Matt