As a founder, I've drastically increased my tinkering time in the past year. It's been fun and has no doubt improved my strategic decisions for Buffer, too. I believe now more than ever before, tinkering time is essential as a founder.

As AI models and tooling improved over the past two years, I found myself being drawn to exploring what is possible and getting back to building myself. I feel fortunate that I have a technical background at a time when AI has been growing and making it much faster and easier to build.

I built Buffer in the early years, but I then went on to have an 8 year gap in coding as the company grew. Coding is something I always missed, but it never felt like I could be efficient enough writing code for it to be a good use of my time. AI has completely changed that equation. It's a dream come true to be able to go so quickly from ideas to working tools. I'm using Claude Code to build all sorts of little tools for my personal productivity and my various workflows as a CEO and creator.

The rise of AI, for me personally, has been a forcing mechanism where there's just no question that I have to be playing with this new technology directly myself. I now see it as a key part of my role to be tinkering with AI, exploring ideas and problems, and feeding those reflections back into company strategy and resourcing decisions. And there's no real way to have high enough fidelity of the possibilities of AI and how fast things are changing without working with it with your own hands. If the executive team of your company is trying to make decisions on how to utilize AI from a purely theoretical lens, I think you should be worried right now.

Even with a technical background I constantly feel behind. Every week it feels like the advancements in technology and tooling are 100x more than I could reasonably explore. And yet I am so energized about these times we're experiencing. It's rare to live through such a drastic shift and feel like you're genuinely seeing it unfold before your eyes. I'm here to play with this, keep my eyes wide open to the opportunities, and see where it leads.