Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

Drafts app is great

Unlock your productivity with Drafts app, the ultimate tool for quick note-taking and seamless organization. Enhance your workflow today!
· micro, productivity

Featured writing

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-Side Dashboard Architecture: Why Moving Data Fetching Off the Browser Changes Everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

Books

The Work of Being (in progress)

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The Practice of Work (in progress)

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Recent writing

We always panic about new tools (and we're always wrong)

Every time a new tool emerges for making or manipulating symbols, we panic. The pattern is so consistent it's almost embarrassing. Here's what happened each time.

Dev reflection - February 03, 2026

I've been thinking about constraints today. Not the kind that block you—the kind that clarify. There's a difference, and most people miss it.

When execution becomes cheap, ideas become expensive

This article reveals a fundamental shift in how organizations operate: as AI makes execution nearly instantaneous, the bottleneck has moved from implementation to decision-making. Understanding this transition is critical for anyone leading teams or making strategic choices in an AI-enabled world.

Notes and related thinking

The one-person company advantage: why coordination overhead is the new competitive liability

Unlock the power of one-person operations as they outpace traditional teams by leveraging AI, minimizing coordination costs, and enhancing decision speed.

Bookmark: Workers who use AI are more productive at work—but less happy, research finds

AI boosts workplace productivity but may diminish creativity and job satisfaction. Explore the paradox of efficiency versus fulfillment in this insightful...

Article analysis: AI Revolution Reshapes Work and Home, Accelerates Faster Than Any Previous Technology

Discover how generative AI is rapidly reshaping work and home life, achieving unprecedented adoption rates and impacting productivity across industries.