{"node":{"id":"2c65dfa6-b8c0-4292-bd25-065a1687d964","handle":"2c65","type":"note","authorName":"Vincent Yeung","intent":null,"title":"Four months ago, I left my job","aiSummary":null,"content":"Four months ago, I left my job, a permanent role, for good.\n\nI've spent 20 years building software products for other businesses. It's given me tremendous personal growth, a network of people I value and friendships that'll last a lifetime. The work not only challenged me, but also gave me security and a reasonably comfortable life.\n\nHonestly, I'd probably still be doing more of the same thing had it not been for the emergence of AI.\n\n## A different kind of disruption\n\n> Businesses use technology to reduce costs, improve quality and get more done. Automating work and replacing human labour is nothing new. But I believe AI is a fundamentally different category of disruption. Where assembly-line automation replaced manual labour, **AI is disrupting cognitive work.**\n>\n> Each person can only process so much information, solve so many problems and make so many decisions. In the past, doing more of that work meant a larger team. And a larger team adds work of its own: keeping people informed, coordinating decisions and making sure everyone is working towards the same thing.\n>\n> **AI can multiply what an experienced person can do.** They can process more information and produce more work, using their experience to steer it and judge the results. That changes the calculation of when a business needs another person.\n>\n> Businesses built around AI from the ground up can organise around smaller teams, with less of that overhead. Large companies competing with them have to rethink how work gets done, how decisions get made and how many people they need.\n>\n> **In that sense, they're competing against themselves first.**\n\n## Where that left me\n\nAnd that's where I saw the problem for myself. The very thing I'd be working towards, helping a business do more with fewer people, would eventually make my own job unnecessary. However senior I became, I'd still be part of the operating model the business needed to change. **To me, this is a dead end.**\n\n**And my position isn't unique.** I can't say every role will be affected, or how this will play out in every business. But large-scale job displacement, sector by sector, doesn't seem unimaginable to me.\n\nWhilst people are still online arguing about em dashes and whether AI is just fancy autocomplete, well-funded teams are building around what it can do. They don't need everyone else to agree with them to keep moving.\n\n**The limits of what you've experienced don't set the limits of what someone else can do.** By the time it affects your work or business, it could feel sudden, even though someone else has spent years building towards it. The outcome is uncertain. But not having seen disruption at that scale yet isn't a reason to dismiss it.\n\n## Why now\n\nI believe AI has enormous potential to help society. But it's arriving at a time when a lot of people and businesses are already under the pump.\n\n**Knowing how to use AI effectively is already an essential skill for staying competitive.**\n\n> It isn't something we can choose not to pay attention to.\n\nAnd the people we look to for leadership are still learning it themselves. How many of them, including those in government, have spent 10,000 hours mastering it? They may be in the same boat as everyone else, still trying to understand what AI is and what it isn't.\n\nThe technology isn't stopping while we figure it out. Look at how much has changed in just twelve months: text, image, video, scientific and mathematical capabilities. The boundaries keep moving. **It feels like time is compressing.**\n\nUltimately, I'm doing this for my family, and my daughter. What world is she going to grow up in, and what part did I play in trying to steer it in a better direction? There are too many unknowns for sitting back and hoping for the best.\n\nI could go into another job, keep making money and focus on providing for my family. Or build a business purely for the financial upside and think about contributing to society later. But that assumes there's time to do those things one after the other. I don't want to put off contributing until some future point when I feel financially ready.\n\nIf I'm taking on the risk of building something, I want it to do both: give my family more freedom and help other people navigate this change. *I want that contribution to be part of the business itself.*\n\n## Starting small\n\nSo how do I do both: build a sustainable business, and help society?\n\nI believe larger-scale change only comes about through small steps first. For me, that began with using my own resources and experience to focus on myself, and then on those around me, in my own physical network.\n\nFundamentally, the question I want to answer is: how can I put my own skills to use to help those around me? It isn't a question about AI. But this is a technology change, and technology is what I know. So in a way, it is.\n\n## You don't know what you don't know\n\nI've intentionally spent much of the past four months working directly with people outside software: retail shop owners, people running small and medium-sized businesses, and people working in construction, broking, design and product.\n\nMy intent was simple: understand how people are using AI in their work and everyday lives, and where they're getting stuck.\n\nWhat I've found is that **people are at very different levels with AI, from barely using it to using it every day. But at every level, they don't know what's possible.**\n\nTake a friend who runs his own retail business. He's still copying and pasting questions and answers between AI and the software he uses to run his shops. He doesn't know that you can connect multiple data sources and practically automate the majority of things he's currently doing manually every day. Or that he could practically operate the digital arm of his business from his phone.\n\nHe doesn't know any of this, and that's understandable, because of how people form their views. You try whatever your workplace allows. You see what your friends and colleagues are doing. You read alarming headlines, then scroll past an impressive demo and wonder whether it actually works outside the video.\n\nIf the tools you've tried haven't been useful, why spend more money? If the first answer is disappointing, why keep going? You might never have seen someone challenge a response, provide more context, connect another tool and arrive at something useful.\n\n> Your experience shapes your belief. That belief shapes how much you explore. And that determines what you experience next.\n\nYou simply don't know what you don't know. Being a software engineer by background doesn't make me immune to it. There's always something I don't know. And AI keeps developing faster than people can keep up with. **The gap between what's possible and what we believe is possible keeps growing.**\n\nI could tell them how good AI is. But they'd only believe me as much as their own experience allows. They need to experience it for themselves. So how do they experience what I've experienced?\n\n## Better decisions\n\nUltimately, what we all want is to make more informed decisions in our lives. What will our kids do when they grow up? Does using AI take away our ability to think and decide for ourselves? These are questions about decisions we're trying to make, with whatever we can see right now.\n\nAnd a good decision needs the clearest picture of reality you can get.\n\nThat was my job as a leader in a business. Gathering information from everyone around me. Understanding the reality of what they were going through right now. What are their challenges? Where are they blocked? They might say one thing and mean another. If there's a conflict, what's really the root cause? Then working out the most impactful, concise information to pass on, whether that's a PowerPoint deck, the words I say or the way I physically express myself.\n\nThe leaders up top want the best information to make their decisions. The people on the ground want to understand why those decisions were made, with the most accurate information they should be privy to. I guess that's what alignment is.\n\nNow we all have to do that job, for our own lives.\n\n## TMI: Too Much Information\n\nAnd getting that picture has never been harder:\n\n1. For most of us, using AI isn't a choice any more. Work demands it. And it's becoming the skill you need, not to find a competitive edge, but to keep one.\n2. Without AI, there was only so much content being produced, and even when it was automated, it wasn't that great. With AI, that limit is gone. It can generate code, articles, images and video without end, and it's only getting better at convincing you it's real.\n3. And most of it is there to take your attention. AI as a product, and the products AI generates, are mostly built to hold it. To do what? Ultimately, to sell you something.\n4. And the boundaries keep moving. What you learnt three months ago is already out of date.\n\nThe result is that we're time poor, and everything out there is competing for the attention we have left. And attention is what we need to see clearly.\n\nSocial media, and so much of what's led us to where we are now, was built to take our attention. Who's building the inverse?\n\n**This is the problem I'm trying to help solve:**\n\n> How do we make better use of what we experience and learn, so we can understand the world more clearly and make better decisions?\n\n## Borrowing experience\n\nExperience takes time to develop, just as relationships do. Some things can't simply be learned instantly; they need to be lived. So we lean on people who've actually done things before. Trust helps us decide whose knowledge to draw on when we can't see everything for ourselves.\n\nIf I needed to build a house, AI could teach me a lot. But I'd still want someone who's actually built houses: my builder or architect friend, someone who's recently completed a similar job, or a professional I'd pay for their experience and proven track record.\n\nThey might know how a particular council operates, what went wrong on a similar project, or something specific to the area that I'd never think to ask about. That's knowledge accumulated through doing the work and learning from the consequences.\n\nUsing AI is no different. AI can approach the same problem in countless ways. But knowing which approach works, under what circumstances, and why still depends on knowledge and judgment. Someone else's experience can reveal a path you didn't know existed.\n\nBut accessing that experience usually requires their time and availability. And even if someone handed me all their notes, I'd still have to find what's relevant, understand it and work out how it applies to my situation.\n\nThis is where AI changes things.\n\nImagine my builder had captured what they'd learned along the way: the problems they encountered, the decisions they made, why they made them and what happened afterwards.\n\nI could use my own AI to work through that knowledge, asking the kinds of questions I'd ask them in person. Why did you choose that approach? What did you rule out? Would it work in my circumstances?\n\nI wouldn't suddenly have their experience. But I could learn from it, at my own pace, without requiring them to explain everything to me individually.\n\nAnd the same applies to how we use AI itself. If someone has worked out a process that produces a useful result, they can capture the steps, tools and patterns behind it. Someone else can follow that process, adapt it and build on it, rather than figuring everything out from scratch.\n\n> Imagine sitting an open-book exam where you're allowed to bring any reference material you want.\n>\n> If you've already solved some of the smaller problems involved, you can bring that work with you and focus on what you haven't figured out yet.\n>\n> Now bring AI into the picture. Two people can have access to the same AI, but give it very different starting points. One is asking it to work from a question alone. The other can bring relevant work, decisions and results, their own or shared by someone they trust.\n\nThe AI is the same. What we have available to work with sets individuals apart.\n\n## Capture before the moment is lost\n\nFor AI to work well for me, it needs more than the question I'm asking right now. It needs relevant information about my life: my experience, my relationships, what I've tried, the decisions I've made and what happened afterwards. That understanding builds over time.\n\nThat information needs to be captured as we go. Once a moment has passed, we can only reconstruct it from what we remember. The details, reasoning and circumstances fade. Better AI in the future won't recover what we never recorded.\n\nAnd we don't always know what will matter later.\n\nI think about this with my daughter. There are things I'm learning today that she might one day find useful, and ordinary moments from her childhood that neither of us will remember clearly years from now. I'd like her to have the option of looking back at those experiences, not just through photographs, but through the context I captured at the time.\n\nThat's part of why I believe this needs to start as early as possible.\n\nNaturally, that raises a question: how much of my life do I want to share with an AI provider?\n\nAs AI gets cheaper to run, I expect the options for using it privately, under our own control, to improve. That's part of the future I'm preparing for.\n\nCapturing information and deciding who can access it are separate decisions. I want to build that record while choosing what stays private, what I make available to AI and what I share with other people.\n\n## Putting that experience to work\n\nWhat you're reading this on is part of my answer. Lattris is the foundation I've been building to address these problems, starting with my own.\n\nI wanted to share what I was learning with people who might find it useful. But a newsletter still asks people to keep up with what I publish. Sharing a \"skill\" or a GitHub repository leaves them needing to understand what it is, how to use it and whether it applies to them.\n\nI could easily add to the overload I was trying to help with.\n\nWhat I want is for people to be able to explore and use that knowledge through their own AI, when they need it.\n\nNot just read what someone concluded, but work through how they got there. Question their reasoning, understand the circumstances and adapt what they've learned to a different problem.\n\nWe shouldn't all have to figure out the same things from scratch.\n\nWhen something works, we should be able to capture how we got there and share what we're comfortable sharing, whether publicly, with a trusted group or with the people closest to us.\n\nThe original knowledge remains ours to control. What we share is our choice, and what someone else makes of it is theirs.\n\nLattris is my attempt to build that foundation: a place to capture and connect knowledge, preserve its context and make it available to AI.\n\nThe name Lattris comes from the idea of individual pieces of knowledge connecting to form a lattice. I imagine it a little like Tetris, except the blocks don't disappear. They build on each other over time.\n\nI'm starting with my own knowledge because that's what I have to offer. But I believe the same foundation could be useful in almost anything we do. Whether you're running a business, developing a skill, working on a project or preserving family memories, there's knowledge and context worth keeping.\n\nSomeone else might use Lattris for entirely different reasons, with their own knowledge, relationships and problems to solve. They don't need to know me, share my philosophy or make their knowledge public.\n\nThe value is in being able to make use of what you know, on your own terms.\n\nI don't believe Lattris is the answer to everything. It's a starting point based on what I've experienced and what I think is needed.\n\nAnd software alone isn't enough. I need to see how people actually use it, where it helps, where it falls short and what I haven't considered.\n\nThat's part of why Lattris is invite-only by design. I want to grow this through real use, feedback and relationships, rather than trying to reach everyone at once.\n\n## What comes next\n\nI've been building and refining my own systems to capture what I'm doing with AI: how I'm using it, what I'm learning and the approaches I keep coming back to when I build.\n\nLattris has grown out of that work. What started as something I needed for myself is now something I'm building for others to use, with the foundations for privacy, ownership and selective sharing that requires.\n\nThis is what I'm starting to share: my working knowledge, including the thinking behind the products I'm building and why I've made the decisions I have.\n\nIt's something you can explore with your own AI, ask questions of and work out how it applies to you. You might discover an approach you hadn't considered, question a decision I've made or find something you can put to work yourself.\n\nIn a way, it'd be like picking my brain without me even knowing you'd asked the question.\n\nBut I also want to find people who are willing to take things further.\n\nI've seen enough of what's possible with AI to know there's a gap between what the technology can do and what most people have experienced. I want to help bridge that gap, starting with the people around me and extending to others who see the opportunity.\n\nYou might be a marketer, designer, builder or business owner who knows your field far better than I do. You bring that experience and the problems you're facing. I can explore how technology and AI might help you approach them differently.\n\nWe can start with what I've already shared, work through what's missing and capture what we learn so it doesn't have to be figured out again.\n\nYou don't need to be technical or know where to start. But you do need to be curious, willing to get your hands dirty and prepared to learn by doing.\n\nI'm interested in problems where we can create genuine value for people, not simply extract more from them. I don't have a fixed list of industries or use cases. I'd rather understand the problem first.\n\nAnd if what we build or learn becomes useful, perhaps others will find their own reasons to use it, share what they know or build something entirely different.\n\nThat's how I hope this grows.\n\nI'm not saying I can solve the world's problems. I'm saying I'm willing to give it a try. And I don't believe I could do this alone.\n\nIf any of this resonates with you, I'd love for you to follow along.\n\nI've already started sharing some of what I've learned, and there's something you can explore today.\n\n**[Explore Lattris's knowledge base](https://lattris.com/by/4/memories/43fffd4b-9661-47dc-a173-7fd01f5d010b)**\n\nLearn how Lattris works, why I've made particular product decisions and how the knowledge itself is structured. This is Lattris's own knowledge tree, separate from mine, and part of how the product is being built.\n\n**[Explore my knowledge about using AI](https://lattris.com/by/b/memories/83c7ec41-ebf8-4f74-82c6-291757bf6244)**\n\nPractical knowledge I've accumulated from using AI, from the basics to reusable patterns and more autonomous ways of working. Open it with your own AI, explore what interests you and see what might be useful.\n\nThere's much more behind what I've built than I've shared so far.\n\nI'm going to continue opening up the reasoning behind Lattris: why I've made particular product decisions, what I've tried, what hasn't worked and what I'm learning as I go.\n\nYou don't need to agree with my thinking or understand the technology. Take what's useful, question what isn't and make your own judgments.\n\nIf you'd like to stay connected, subscribe for updates. And if you're interested in using Lattris yourself or exploring something together, you can also [join the waitlist](https://lattris.com/waitlist) and tell me a little about yourself, what you're working on or the problems you're trying to solve.\n\nThe work has already begun. This is where I start sharing the journey.\n\nLet's see where it goes.","capturedAt":"2026-10-15T00:14:32.355Z","createdAt":"2026-10-15T00:14:32.356Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-28T03:21:31.865Z","spanId":null,"contributor":null,"audiences":[{"kind":"public","createdAt":"2026-10-15T00:14:32.356Z"}],"fingerprint":"3f9bdc968010cd729148b59ea9c9b965a559777e74fb5f59d341dd413471cc24","revisionNo":"12","structureHash":"9929d8f9a4c822dbae5207785f3746cf1510010e5c825ada7afd9baa74f528db","page":"https://lattris.com/by/b/memories/2c65dfa6-b8c0-4292-bd25-065a1687d964"},"links":[{"direction":"out","verb":"references","reason":"only if the person wants to know how Lattris works and why it was built this way, on Lattris's own tree","hash":"4836caa097424300bc662435900fca44cf8e892f7dc199fec8d4cb4b9196f006","node":{"id":"43fffd4b-9661-47dc-a173-7fd01f5d010b","handle":"43ff","type":"note","title":"Lattris — a memory store for your life","aiSummary":"What Lattris is, for a person and for the AI they bring: knowledge held as linked blocks the person owns, how this tree is read, and where everything else lives. Hand an AI this block first.","erased":false,"href":"https://lattris.com/api/lattris/by/4/memories/43fffd4b-9661-47dc-a173-7fd01f5d010b?links=1","fingerprint":null,"revisionNo":null,"structureHash":null,"foreign":{"owner":{"handle":"4","displayName":"Lattris"},"page":"https://lattris.com/by/4/memories/43fffd4b-9661-47dc-a173-7fd01f5d010b"},"intent":"recipe","authorName":"Lattris","page":"https://lattris.com/by/4/memories/43fffd4b-9661-47dc-a173-7fd01f5d010b"}},{"direction":"out","verb":"references","reason":"only if the person wants practical ways to use AI well, from the basics to reusable patterns","hash":"0e76125184a748a9d246fb26364467fc1b376a85f94c3dd895df790ccb135d63","node":{"id":"83c7ec41-ebf8-4f74-82c6-291757bf6244","handle":"83c7","type":"note","title":"Getting real use out of AI — start here","aiSummary":"Root of a public tree about using AI well, read by a person's own AI on their behalf. On first read the AI settles two things it can see: which kind of tool this is (chat vs code) and which model is answering. Then five layers open in order: First, Giving AI more reach, Basics, Intermediate, Autonomous. Rule on every page: say where the person stands before saying what the author does, then act on the gap they choose.","erased":false,"href":"https://lattris.com/api/lattris/by/b/memories/83c7ec41-ebf8-4f74-82c6-291757bf6244?links=1","fingerprint":"067f8f2d8331bbe851855e7ad3a628ed7ca7b96222377717fd6c976053fb3ae6","revisionNo":"21","structureHash":"39a9479f09bbeeb466e71cd46760ff5c03b7ec4ab33986ea243f2431157365bf","intent":"recipe","authorName":"Vincent Yeung","page":"https://lattris.com/by/b/memories/83c7ec41-ebf8-4f74-82c6-291757bf6244"}},{"direction":"in","verb":"references","reason":"only if the person wants to know who wrote this and why: Vincent's story of leaving his job","hash":"c0ac8ded0cf886dd890faf73757c22f18ab4816d527fe77f356a7885c989b106","node":{"id":"b9766dc4-a08d-4dc6-90b9-a91e5d0e8bbe","handle":"b976","type":"note","title":"Start here: what this could do for you","aiSummary":null,"erased":false,"href":"https://lattris.com/api/lattris/by/b/memories/b9766dc4-a08d-4dc6-90b9-a91e5d0e8bbe?links=1","fingerprint":"5d80d0f1af139208daef011bfe5ab8e47d704c74e8ce698e4b7c1da67e32caba","revisionNo":"13","structureHash":"c614a7fb546dd2a5dc15fcae89fd87653c24d75c1ae74693ee5dbb4bbdaa4fbf","intent":"recipe","authorName":"Vincent Yeung","page":"https://lattris.com/by/b/memories/b9766dc4-a08d-4dc6-90b9-a91e5d0e8bbe"}}],"dictionary":{"lattris":"A personal knowledge base — how a person captures what they know as linked blocks they own and control. To understand how this knowledge base works: https://lattris.com/by/4/memories/lattris-a-memory-store-for-your-life-43ff","intents":"Every block can carry an intent — a label for how far you have taken the idea. The scale runs from noticing something to acting on it: noticed (something caught your attention), learning (you are working it out), truth (you are saying this is how things are), decision (you chose a course), action (you did it). Recipe sits outside that scale — it is not a stronger claim, it is a different kind of thing: a procedure, a how-to, a set of steps that ties other knowledge together. Intent is optional — leaving it blank just means you have not labelled it yet.","trees":"Each person's blocks form their own tree. A link marked foreign leads to one block on another person's tree; it is shown here with its owner's name and is not walked further from here. What it says is that person's knowledge, not this author's, and it carries its own instructions when you open it."},"instructions_to_ai":"This is knowledge from a personal knowledge base. Read it and consider how it's relevant to what the person you're talking to needs. Follow the linked blocks to explore further related topics if it might be useful to the user; open each at its page address. Start by letting the user know what this is about and how it may be relevant to them. Some links lead to another person's tree; each is marked foreign and names its owner. Follow one only if its reason fits what the person you are helping needs, and when you use what you find there, say whose tree it came from."}