Anna's Meanderings

The ebook for What Machines Can’t Replace is scheduled to publish in August, 2026. I still feel a little giddy each time I type those dates. You can find the book at whatmachinescantreplace.com, and pre-orders are open now for ebooks on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple books, and Kobo. Print pre-orders are coming soon. The book is about what humans bring to creative work in an age of AI, and…

I’ve been travelling for years. Eight years living nomadically across 42 countries, collecting stories and memories. I have numerous travel journals, thousands of photos. I remember fireflies in the Colombian Amazon, night trains through China, getting spectacularly food poisoned in India. But when trying to turn these memories into something coherent, I keep getting distracted by the structure…

Sometimes I feel caught between being an AI engineer and a gardener. A champion for sustainability. An artist who values what is made by hand. And then — for 40 (or let’s be real, more) hours a week — I am a software engineer. And yet… here we are. More and more, I’ve started to see myself not as divided, but as a bridge. A translator between two worlds. Someone fluent in both languages. I’m…

Thankfully, the room laughed when I showed my AI-generated headshots at Web Directions Developer Summit last week. I’d asked AI to remove my boyfriend from a photo, and it gave me a different man instead. Then a jungle background with a cocktail. I built a portfolio site using Lovable – a currently popular no-code AI builder where you can describe what you want, and watch it come to life in…

When I first started learning about Model Context Protocol, I kept finding that there was no “intermediate” level. Every explanation assumed either I knew nothing, and that I should just like to know “What does MCP stand for?” or that I was an expert and already knew what everything meant. I’d read “the MCP server exposes tools that the client can invoke” and think… right, but what is a server in…

I’ve been trying to find my first website for ages now. The McPhee Family Pets, circa 1999. Hours down rabbit holes of the Wayback Machine, trying every possible URL combination I can think of. Was it heartland/prairie? EnchantedForest? Did I use underscores or hyphens? The internet has swallowed it whole, along with Porygon’s Cave and whatever I called Horsea’s page (Horsea’s Haven? Horsea’s…

I think in metaphors. It’s how I understand anything complex – by finding connections to something I already know, preferably from a completely different domain. When I first started learning about AI concepts, I’d read the formal definitions and feel like I was staring at a wall of text. But then someone would say “it’s like…” and everything would click into place. So I started collecting…

I keep seeing these LinkedIn posts about how we shouldn’t treat AI as our junior developer, how we still need to hire juniors so we have seniors when the current generation retires. And while I agree we absolutely need junior developers, something about this framing sits wrong with me. It feels like we’re defending junior developers by essentially saying “we need them as human code-writing…

I had Engineering AI live-streaming on my office screen yesterday afternoon when Geoffrey Huntley gave his talk “The future belongs to people who can just do things“. It was the third time I’d heard this presentation this year, and I found myself nodding along to his point about the shift from ‘artisanal hand-crafted commits‘ to something much bigger. But this time, instead of thinking about what…

I’ve been collecting these photographs across more than a decade of visits to Oaxaca, starting from my very first trip in May 2013. When I look at them now, the textures and colours transport me immediately – those distinctive Oaxacan tablecloths, the hand-painted dishes, the flowers scattered in the background. I can taste the flavours all over again. What surprised me most, initially, was…

Tomorrow I start Joe Hudson’s Connection course. This week, I’ve started reading Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments. Each evening, I’m working with apps to sharpen my algorithmic thinking. Somehow these three seemingly separate things feel deeply connected – the science of small experiments, the art of human connection, the systematic way of approaching the world with curiosity. All mindset…

I remember nothing from that biology class at Otago University eighteen years ago – not the curriculum, not my classmates, not even what grade I got. But I remember his frogs. There was this professor who would hand out chocolate frogs when we answered bonus questions correctly. He’d share a frog fact of the day during breaks, and his face would light up talking about the incredible healing…