Anyways, this is my version of that.

One of the biggest motivators for me creating this Substack was the amount of content I’d have to cut from my LinkedIn posts in order to hit that sweet, short 3,000-character limit.

I actually thought I would have finished writing and posting it last week, but I wanted to give myself a bit of breathing room since we are in PEAK graduation post season. Pair that with the silly amount of expectations I put on myself and my editorial process and of course I spent an embarrassing amount of time on it.

So here’s the director’s cut. The deleted scenes. The stuff that almost made it and the stuff that got yeeted into the void because I was very much at the character limit.

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THE DARTMOUTH BIT

At some point I had this whole clever thing planned where I’d contrast Dartmouth’s motto of “Vox Clamantis in Deserto,” which translates to “a voice crying in the wilderness” with CMU’s “my heart is in the work.” The bit was going to be something like: Dartmouth’s motto gives off being in the wilderness trying to find my identity whereas CMU’s was learning how to pour every ounce of energy into it now that I knew who I was.

I was very proud of this at first until I tried translating it into easily understood sentences for someone who wasn’t a part of Camp Dartmouth and couldn’t really make it land in a way that wasn’t confusing. Maybe it still doesn’t make much sense here but the point was that CMU gave me a lot of an easier motto to work with than Dartmouth. Into the void it went.

—

THE GRADES RANT

There was going to be a whole mini rant about how grades in my field are kind of made up and I stopped caring about them in undergrad and blah blah blah.

This got cut for two reasons. One: it reads as arrogant even when you don’t mean it to. Two: I graduated with honors so it really reads as arrogant. The better story was why the honors happened all while I was too busy actually doing things I cared about to stress about the grade. That’s a different point entirely and a much less annoying one.

There’s a part of me that kind of loves seeing the chaos of discussions around grade inflation and AI in higher education so the grades rant is still in my drafts somewhere and will likely become its own thing. We’ll see.

—

PLAGIARIZING SOMEONE’S QUOTE BY ACCIDENT

My mom has always said something along the lines of “they can take a lot from you, but they can never take your education”, especially post-divorce. It’s a beautiful sentiment and very her and I wanted to put it in the post.

When I asked Claude, apparently, this is loosely attributed to B.B. King, but every Reddit post seems to attribute it to some older relative having the same sentiment and passing it down. I could have asked her, and looking at this, I think at some point I meant to, but it’s kind of funny just leaving it as a mystery. Maybe it’s something that the older generation just likes to quote without really knowing who it’s from.

Speaking of my mom….

—

MY MOM’S PHOTOS OF JENSEN HUANG

At one point there was a line about how my mom’s photos from the full campus ceremony, taken in the pouring rain, were mostly of Jensen Huang because she couldn’t find me in the crowd. Obviously, rain or shine, my family was out there for Jensen. #Nvidiastonks

It’s a funny anecdote to me and anyone who sees her Facebook post will see the two photos and video of him and one of me (and one of me and him together that she made with ChatGPT) Sadly, I had to cut it since I wanted to make more room for thanking people in my LinkedIn post, but the Jensen Huang fancam from her cracks me up.

—

THE JENSEN HUANG QUOTE THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

I also meant to look back at the commencement VOD for a quote since anchoring my writing to one of those helps me get at the central theme. Naturally I thought, great, I’ll open with a Jensen Huang quote.

No shade to him, but the speech was pretty mid and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had to take multiple PR pass throughs to get okay’d though I do love the flex on how he met his wife.

There’s been this new thing happening at commencements where some out of touch exec talks about AI and the crowd boos. This happened a bit with Jensen too and yeah, I did not want to be that person. I yap about AI enough already.

So I went with Carnegie Mellon’s motto instead, which has been around since 1900 and has never gotten anyone booed. Safe choice. I stand by it.

—

LINKEDIN ANGST

At one point the LinkedIn section read: “The fear of being cringe and perceived is real, but it’s funny how much easier it is to write when you’ve got nothing left to lose.”

It got cut because I’ve written about LinkedIn angst so many times that even I was like, okay Sara we get it. If you want the full unhinged version of that conversation, I already wrote it here.

I’m honestly pretty proud of that post and even showed it to a LinkedIn employee at Grace Hopper and it’s something that comes up allllll the time when someone asks me how to get hired in 2026 (post post post, make your existence known or you’re just another resume in the void)

I also tried to frame my LinkedIn as a mini-capstone but that became too much and I went with living archive instead. Hopefully that still got the point across and I am pretty proud that I was able to develop a semi-consistent posting schedule and actually hit post on things.

—

VIDEO EDITING OR HOW GROUP PROJECTS DIDN’T SUCK

This part wasn’t even going to be in the LinkedIn post but it didn’t really have enough to stand alone as its own segment so I’m throwing this here.

I was the one editing the videos for our group projects. This was a role that I took on voluntarily and obsessively, mainly because it was something I had done for many classes in the past and something I scrutinized heavily over whenever someone else did it.

It also gave me the benefit of unlimited retakes. If there’s anything I know about listening to my own voice, it’s that I have so many “ums,” and more embarrassingly, gasp for air in between my words. Naturally, I wanted to spare someone else the lengthy duty of removing them, or worse, just leaving them in untouched.

I got used to my classmates’ different mannerisms, such as figuring out the maximum speed rate I could put them at while preserving the pitch. I got so deep into it that I can now recognize the exact sound wave pattern of my friend saying “um” because I cut it out so many times.

At the same time, I didn’t really mind these video editing duties. I had a group member who was absolutely goated at picking the perfect slide template and formatting the information, I had another classmate who tried harder than I think he’d admit at making sure the material was perfect, and me tying it all together and sending off the final cut! Even when both of them would send me audio files that were five minutes each for a 10-minute video, and I still hadn’t recorded my part, we found a way to make it work.

Maybe group projects don’t have to be doomed and one-sided after all.

Okay! That’s the director’s cut. Hope you enjoyed the chaos.

Here’s a treat for all of you that made it to the end.

i. the cafe

I'm writing this from a café that Claude helped me find (somewhere with WiFi open late on a Sunday night since the library is closed). It’s a bit after 8 PM, just a few minutes after the Apple Store on Boylston St closed. I frantically got there right before closing and decided to unbox it now instead of waiting until I got back home.

This place is full of people also on their laptops so I don’t feel out of place setting up what I’m affectionately calling my “expensive typewriter”. The cacio e Pepe bagel is… kind of mid, but they used a generous amount of cream cheese and the smoothie was nice.

Hearing a “STAYC Girls, it’s going down” from the most recent song has convinced me that whoever runs the playlist has stellar taste. It reminds me of when my friend Ginny took me to see them live in Boston (10/10 concert btw).

I decided to try and write for a while and see how long this Neo’s battery life really lasted (spoilers: it holds up really really well). Maybe now I can get back to writing instead of….well a lot has happened in the past month.

There’s an embarrassingly long gap between my last post in April and now. Part of the cost of “wanting to do all of the things I want to do without having to give any of them up” is having to delay that desire because of time. I’ve mentioned that I refuse to just have the LLM write for me, even though it has a copious amount of data on me, because literally what would be the point of that.

At the same time, it’s not like I really told anyone about this project? Blog? Extended version of my LinkedIn? Diary that exists publicly on the internet? The exact identity of this writing works is admittedly still to be decided and I thought I would give myself more time to figure it out. Then I said f*ck it we ball because that’s what I’ve found forces me to find that identity along the way.

Also, I work best when there’s a deadline lighting a fire under my butt to push myself hopefully not to the point of dropping this completely.

ii. the part where I justify buying a new laptop

Back to the MacBook Neo because she a cutie. I never thought I’d consider myself a writer, still don’t tbh, I’m sure plenty of what I post on here will have first-draft-energy and that’s kind of the point. If you want polished, look at my LinkedIn, I don’t have the bandwidth to do that x2

As for why I got a Neo specifically for this purpose, the idea was simple enough. I needed a writing machine that couldn’t tempt me into spinning up a model mid-sentence or switching over to side projects or literally anything else. I’ve entered the “multi-Clauder” phase of my relationship with Claude Code, which has been amazing for my coding life and abysmal for my writing. I can and always will give into those temptations and the bonus of a new laptop is that I’m too lazy to sign into Instagram, Twitter etc because I don’t feel like fighting with two factor authentication.

I’ve seen other peoples’ writing devices, but part of how I function is that I have many many ideas all at once and like to contain them to multiple windows, which works best on MacOS. To further reassure myself that I wasn’t just fully tempted by having a cute pink light laptop (which played a huge factor), I made a table for myself breaking down what I’ve tried writing with.

iii. reality

So here we are in the coffee shop. As someone who’s always worked remote post-pandemic, I feel like there’s a tendency to romanticize working from one of these places. It might be hilarious to people who actually are regulars somewhere with the way I view it as fantasy to actually be a regular at one of these places, typing away on my laptop and taking in the vibe of the space with a sense of focus and purpose.

Here’s what it actually looks like: I’ve been eating my bagel with only my left hand in in chunks so I don’t get my brand-new keyboard messy, with mixed results. I have at least four parallel threads open in my head right now and stressing over why I didn’t bring a notebook (I forgot it at home). I have been switching between this piece, a graduation post I’ve been procrastinating on, ideas for what else to load my Substack with, and a to-do list of things I want to feed to Claude Code when I get home because I couldn’t connect to the WiFi here. At the same time, I see the writing happening and something clicks about why people come to places like this.

In both cases of the Neo and the coffee shop, constraint is a feature. Whether it’s being surrounded with tempting rabbit holes and software or the many many distractions of my home, stripping it away does add layers of clarity.

That’s the other part I’ve learned to embrace about myself. Any distraction is lethal to me, but…why fight it in the first place? Instead of trying to force better discipline into myself, why not design more ideal conditions?

Now, I’m not saying that the MacBook Neo is magically going to make me into a consistent writer, but getting clarity about what works and doesn’t work about my previous attempts gives me some hope for this next chapter.

I started sneezing multiple times at the shop and took it as a sign that I was getting chilly and took an Uber home (I’m not about to get on the Green Line with a $500 new computer, I’m not insane).

Then, I went to one of the common room spaces in my apartment and wrote the LinkedIn post about my graduation all the way until 11:30 PM. I didn’t finish this current train of thought until two days later.

The Neo’s battery still held out strong.

to sum it up, some things I’ve learned about how I work:

☐ Deadlines are not the enemy. They’re the only reason anything gets done.

☐ Any distraction is lethal. The solution is better conditions.

☐ Constraint is a feature, not a punishment.

☐ I have multiple brain streams running at once. Fighting that wastes energy.

☐ I will always find my identity for a project by doing it, not by planning it first.

☐ F*ck it we ball is a legitimate creative strategy.

iv. Macbook Neo Review

The Neo is great for writing. It is not great for the seventeen other things I might do instead of writing, but that’s not what I need it for right now. The keyboard is nice to use, the weight is incredibly light, even better than an M1 Mac Air. The performance is better than my very low expectations for Liquid Glass. Apple has really done it again

I have a few trips that I expect to take it on instead of my usual big boi M3 and I’m excited to see how it holds up. Today’s results have been promising.

#notsponsoredbyApple

If we’re being honest, AI slop is a problem of our own making. The attempts to censor, curb personality, sand down every edge of writing into “formality” has led us here. It’s why I truly hope AI will lead to the pendulum swinging back the other way and bringing personality with it.

The Formality Problem

There’s this invisible bar that exists between formal and casual, and everyone’s performing a register that doesn’t actually fit them.

The formal-to-casual bar stresses me out and at this point… I give up! I literally reply to peoples’ emails and LinkedIn DMs like I’m texting them unless I have some obvious reason to be formal. The more we try to enforce these distinctions, the weirder and more stilted everything sounds.

If you need a visual representation of what I’m talking about: look at the way brands changed their icons to be more minimalist. As a self-proclaimed maximalist, I hate this. Everything got flatter, rounder, more generic… and for what? To seem approachable? To seem professional? It’s the same energy. Smooth out the personality until there’s nothing left to sand.

People who DM me on LinkedIn trying to not be so uptight are still getting the same message across. Uptight-ness didn’t make it more correct. It just made it more exhausting to write and more exhausting to read and more often than not, why I end up taking forever to respond over DMs unless I just let myself respond naturally like myself!

AI Made Things Worse (But Not How You Think)

I’ve always believed that AI has only amplified existing problems that already existed and writing is no exception. AI didn’t create the slop. It automated a failure mode that already existed.

When you build a tool optimized to sound professional and inoffensive, you get professional and inoffensive and for a lot of us, that’s a direct reflection of what we asked for. We trained these things on the same overcorrected, personality-stripped content we’d been producing for years, and then acted surprised when it came out sounding like complete corpo-jargon.

For the more visual people, it’s like how so many logos of companies have been stripped of personality over time. Genuinely, I’ve never seen a rebrand that I’ve liked and that still continues to today. Also see Corporate Memphis (you’ve probably seen it before)

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional designer, these are just my thoughts as someone with eyes.

My LinkedIn has been a year-long experiment of seeing how much I can get away with taking my unhinged adventures and projects to a “normie” audience, and after I got a job, I thought that would be the end of it. Weirdly enough, I ended up having a lot of fun with it and that’s really what matters to me at the end of the day. If I’m not having fun… what’s the point? (aside from networking, getting a job, etc)

How I Actually Write Things With AI

I am a big believe of transparency and thought it would be appropriate to at least outline what my current workflow is, as someone who just defined some semblance of a workflow last year. Tldr; I talk to myself a lot more now

Most people would call what I do journaling. I don’t for many reasons. I’ve tried journaling before and it was mainly me venting into paragraphs of blobs and maybe that’s what this comes off as well, but I’d like to think there’s more cohesion to what I’m trying to express.

When I’m writing things, I don’t really care about the words. I care about the ideas and I need to get the core ones out of my head before they get lost in the never-ending stream of thoughts.

My solution? I yap. I talk at Claude, dump everything, and let it pull out the essential pieces. The substance of my thoughts and my ideas stays the same and I’ll often tell it to preserve as much of my original voice as possible before it spits something back at me. If something’s factually wrong (like saying I read a manga when I actually watched the anime), I’ll fix it. Otherwise? Clean it up, structure it, whatever. It’s still mine where it counts.

The pipeline:

brain → yap (Willow dictation) → Claude → structured output → Craft ('my “second brain” AKA a fun way for me to store MD files, think Obsidian but cuter)

That’s it. No writing. No formatting. No maintaining a system. The only step I’m actually responsible for is having the thought.

Why Formatting Can Die

Here’s the paradox: I like things properly formatted. I hate being the one to format them.

When I format things myself, I either break the system trying to min-max it, cramming stickers on a sheet, ignoring padding guidelines, making it work my way, or I abandon it entirely because the overhead isn’t worth it. The exceptions are tactile: scrapbooking, sticker books. Physical arrangement is much easier than digital templating.

This is why Notion failed me and Craft works. Notion is templates staring at you, demanding to be filled in and maintained. Craft is simpler basically a prettier Obsidian, less structure, and MCP-able so Claude can write directly to it without me touching it.

The underlying philosophy: the first step to reducing friction is figuring out where the friction actually is. Then eliminate it or route around it. I don’t adapt to systems — I find systems that adapt to how my brain works.

Back to What Kind of Writing You Can Expect Here

I’m not promising I won’t use AI to write out certain paragraphs. I’ve been drafting out the first few issues of this newsletter by dumping thoughts into various notes and then using AI to put them together. That being said, everything expressed here are all organic beliefs, unhinged ideas, and specific takes that I don’t think AI would ever be able to come up with on its own. That’s what I want to focus on.

So, let me lay it all out here:

• I won’t just have AI generate an article from scratch because that would be boring and pointless and kind of lame and cringe

• I will continue to have AI (mainly my boi Claude) be my notetaker when I’m reading out scribbles from my notebook or brain dumping while taking a dump so I don’t forget about the thoughts I want to write out

  • This is a recurring theme, we’ll be coming back to this a lot

• I will be proofreading everything AI might “generate on my behalf” although honestly I end up rewording what it gives me anyways

  • It’s way easier for me to edit than to deal with the blank word doc problem so I don’t mind that

• A lot of the section designations are probably coming from AI, I’m having way more fun filling in the gaps

This newsletter is my proof of concept of what it looks like to write without care about the formalities. If I have to AI-ify my writing, then something has gone terribly wrong. Until then, I hope you’ll follow me on this journey/experiment/hopefully coherent-stream-of-thoughts!

Mine is simple. I want to do all of the things I want to do without having to give any of them up.

If that sounds a bit insane, we might not have caught up in a while. Otherwise, you might know that my “normal” consists of months where I travel every weekend for a different convention while working as a full-time engineer finishing a master’s degree, crafting together freebies the night before and documenting parts of the journey on LinkedIn for fun.

I had a glimpse of this dream life last year during what I’ve called my “adult sabbatical”, which was a lot less “change the world” and more “work alongside my own brain instead of against it.” To me, this meant finding a better way to manage a brain that runs seventeen parallel tracks. More on this later.

Most of the advice I’ve gotten about success was some version of “pick one thing.” You’re spreading yourself too thin. You can’t do all of it. And sometimes, that may be true, but it’s never stopped me from trying.

It’s also times like this when I appreciate my loved ones and therapist who try their best to follow my racing train of thought, especially after I realized how many trains were happening simultaneously.

This year, I finally found a way to channel the chaos into something that actually works. I’ve always embraced the insanity, but there’s a difference between embracing it and making things actually work, and now I’m hoping to share some of those creations with the rest of the world.

So, it might be time for a reintroduction.

I’m an engineer and full time data gremlin who’s graduating soon with my master’s in Business Analytics. I'm addicted to automating things and hoarding data on anything that piques my interest and a total dopamine addict. I’m a home maximalist and an artificer who loves figuring out ways to create every kind of product possible. I’ve been an unashamed nerd, anime watcher and gamer since I could read and love shoving those interests into as many projects as possible as a way to learn, grow, and have fun along the way.

This newsletter is the extended cut of everything that doesn’t fit in a LinkedIn post because wow 3000 characters is shorter than you might think. It turns out I actually like writing when I find the topics interesting! I definitely have a backlog of thoughts and projects to share.

Over the next few issues, I’m going to walk you through my first mega project that’s consumed my life in the first half of the year, starting with why existing tools kept failing me, how I created a hamster system that actually works, and how you might build your own version if your brain also refuses to pick just one thing.

And maybe, I might be able to inspire you to achieve your own dreams along the way.

What’s your dream?

Coming up next: AI Agents for the Rest of Us, or How I Operate My Life with the Help of 17+ Hamsters