I still remember the first time I had a hazy IPA. Brewing at a lager-focused brewery at that time, we prided ourselves on not brewing an IPA at all, an act of hubris to be sure though it did help tell a story. We focused on traditional beers, priding ourselves on technique. For those who haven’t brewed beer before, just know that we brewers worked real damn hard to get beers clear, especially our IPAs where you’re desperately trying to get all that hop matter to drop out.

IPAs were already something of a weird subset, our cousins who just got hoppier and hoppier by the day. And now you’re telling me we’re not even gonna let the dang things drop clear?

I was open to trying it, though perhaps snidely was excited at the idea of not liking it. At proving us “purists” right.

And then I had one.

And it was absolutely delicious.

Hazy IPAs took over, and we came to learn that making good ones was also incredibly difficult. That keeping a stable haze wasn’t easy. That there was just as much science that went into making a perfect hazy as there was making a perfect lager.

The purists said it’d be the end of craft beer.

They said the same thing about Kettle Sours.

And about Milkshake IPAs.

And then the darndest thing happened, lagers actually became in vogue again.

It’s an eerie time to make the comparison I’m about to make given that the craft beer industry is struggling mightily. But as a former craft brewer turned software engineer and now CTO, my mind can’t help but see similarities between the launch of hazy IPAs and the explosion of AI ever since its big bang moment back in 2023.

I was weirdly at similar points in my career for both. At this juncture where I was transitioning from the beginning of my career in those fields into this point of having more of a voice, taking on some more leadership, and forming strong opinions on the right and wrong ways to do things. I had thoughts on the perfect dosing amount of biofine to help a beer drop clear. On the exact temperature to ferment a Hefeweizen at to get more banana phenols than clove.

I was finally getting confident in my coding skills and now here’s this thing threatening the entire paradigm. I was desperately trying to learn more, diving headfirst, worshipping at the altar of Uncle Bob and others, and now everything is changing?

With AI it wasn’t quite the same lightbulb moment for me as that hazy IPA was. Using ChatGPT to help troubleshoot was helpful, but it wasn’t what using Codex or Claude Code is today. It was never lost on me, though, that then, just like now, it was the most primitive it would ever be.

Now it’s everywhere, much like hazy IPAs, with people who never coded before enjoying it for the first time and many hardened engineers begging the world to see it for the existential threat it is. A lot of what’s put out there is bad, much like many of our first attempts at hazy IPAs, broken apps people are shipping prematurely. Horrible CI/CD practices making any future fixes on an app seemingly impossible. Tools claiming to be AI that are the same products companies always offered just rebranded.

But a lot of it is beyond good. It took me a while to begin trusting Claude Code, my current tool of choice, but the reality is I do trust it now. I’ve set up structures around it. I’ve become religious about plan mode and reading all output. I have ample documentation for both me and my team to follow and our coding tools are forced to reference it too. But, in the same breath, it’s hard for me to imagine a world without it now.

That scares me far more than it comforts me, but it’s true. The things I’ve had it help me build are tools I am genuinely proud of, and they were done way faster than I could’ve possibly done on my own. In a role where I was the only developer until very recently, the ability to have essentially a fleet of junior developers on call who I could deploy at a moment’s notice was invaluable (certainly worth far more than my subscription cost) and it’s only getting better. Even the “junior developer” framing feels disingenuous these days. The good ones aren’t junior anymore. They’re whatever you are, but faster, and with a deeper bench.

But it’s not magic. The speed with which it outputs code means it is uniquely talented at exposing all your faults, personal or systematic. Bad assumptions surface in minutes instead of weeks. Sloppy architecture compounds in real time. The brewery comparison holds here too: the breweries who made great hazy IPAs were the ones who were also good at making incredible lagers. They had their systems and processes dialed in, which allowed them to take full advantage of this new exciting thing.

AI is no different in my mind.

If you have rigid structures in place. If you run tests. If you have a deployment pipeline. If you have strong version control. If you have style guidelines that everyone is on the same page with. If you have strong oversight.

If you have all of those things, then you can make incredible beer, and you can make incredible things utilizing AI.

If you don’t, you still may stumble onto an incredible product, but you also may make a batch you have to dump entirely. You may have an infected batch you don’t catch until it’s too late. Your ability to be consistent and safe evaporates.

The existential threat of it is much harder to quantify, and much more far-reaching, than beer. It’s changing everything, and it’ll continue to. What that means on the other side of this is impossible to know, and I am in no way trying to handwave that away.

What I am saying is that I was an idiot when I handwaved away hazy IPAs or Kettle Sours or any of the other beer trends that hit while I was still in the industry. That I was short-sighted when I thought it’d be a long time before OpenAI’s products would be anything more than high-end bug fixers.

The other side of this very well may be horrible. But it might also be really damn good. And the people best positioned to find out are the ones who already know how to make a clean lager.

I was hooked.

Writing has always been an on and off passion of mine, more off than on as life’s gotten busier around me, but whenever I’m not doing it I find myself missing it dearly. I’ve tried many outlets for it, leaving a minefield of half-written stories in my wake. On this very Substack you can find my work about a fictional football team I followed during COVID and the community we built around it. That project was itself a spin-off of another fake-football-team series, which was itself a spin-off of a Substack/SB Nation series following a fake basketball team. In the intro to that one I called it a Spin-Off of a Spin-Off, an acknowledgment of its silly origins.

As I stared at the screen trying to think of what to call whatever this Substack would become, I was deleting the old bio until A Spin-Off of a Spin-Off was the only thing left. And I decided to leave it.

I think it may be the most apropos way to describe my life and career so far. Not in some diminishing way. I’m truly the happiest I’ve ever been in almost every single aspect of my life right now. But in my 33 years on this planet I’ve at different times taken serious steps towards becoming, or been, the following:

A Lawyer, A Pastor, A Missionary, An Accountant, A City Councilor, A Brewer, A Canvasser, A Bartender, A Teacher, A Guidance Counselor, A Banker, A Sportswriter, A Bookstore Owner, A Salesman, An Account Manager, An Economist, An Occupational Therapist, A Statistician, A Customer Service Representative, A Franchise Owner, A Data Scientist, A Software Developer, and I’m sure a dozen more.

But those ideas, as scattered as they may seem on this page, have always led one into the next. I don’t see them as disconnected, I can see the thread between them clear as day. Just as I can see the thread connecting that Harry Potter roleplay site to my love for storytelling to why I felt called to start this Substack. And maybe that’s what this place is for: pulling on those threads in public, to see where they lead.

Drafting is a working title, a play on brewing, coding, and writing, as well as the fact that I’m unsure what this space will be. I’m guessing the title will stick, even as I’m writing this unsure I’ll share the space with anyone at all.

Technology and Business will likely get the most attention; it’s where I live now. But my love for Sports and Stories isn’t going anywhere, and it’d be dishonest to pretend Spirituality and Beer won’t sneak in too. The whole premise of a Spin-Off of a Spin-Off is not picking a lane.

I wrote this piece to provide some insight into what my vision for this place is but, as you can likely tell, I’m having trouble defining it.

So I’ll define Drafting as one thing, and it’s the way I would define my entire life’s journey up to this juncture.

A Spin-Off of a Spin-Off.

Welcome in.