This week I found myself reflecting on how I consume content.

When I set out to explore a topic, whether it’s something concrete like implementing an MCP server at work or broader questions around life and my purpose, I often fall down a rabbit hole of podcasts, blogs, and talks. I consume a lot, but rarely pause to understand what I’ve actually taken away. As a result, I’m left feeling unsure of my own opinions.

Part of the problem is structural. We have instant access to an infinite amount of content, increasingly shaped by personalized algorithms. Without clear intent, it’s easy to let those systems decide what we consume and how we think about the world.

This year, I’m trying to flip the script: more reflection before more consumption.

Through these weekly updates, I’m hoping to let reflection guide what I seek out next, rather than defaulting to what my feeds serve me. Spending more time writing and thinking helps me slow down, internalize ideas, and begin forming mental models instead of accumulating disconnected insights.

This connects to an idea from Poor Charlie’s Almanack, where Charlie Munger talks about worldly wisdom:

“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”

As I continue to consume content this year, I want to be more intentional about building that latticework by using reflection to connect ideas, rather than letting volume overwhelm understanding.

Interesting Ideas

• How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills: This was an interesting article from Anthropic on how utilizing AI reduces mastery for developers. However, we can all be more intentional with how we use the tools to gain deeper understanding into what exactly we are building. Code review and going back and forth with your agents is going to be so critical moving forwards.
• Inside OpenAI’s in-house data agent: Love how the team at OpenAI publicly shared their approach to using AI Agents to better retrieve information across a wide array of data sources. Internally at RBC Borealis, I’m working on a project that tackles these same problems and it’s cool to see how this is still an ever evolving problem.
• Mark Carney’s Davos Address: This talk generated a lot of buzz on my feeds and rightfully so. “We take the world as it is, and not as we want it to be” relates a lot to defining and working within constraints simply because we can only do what we can control. I highly recommend watching this to better understand how the world operates.