Favorite places irl & the internet

I was in San Francisco that week for onboarding at my new role. New city, new room full of people, and the same thing happens every time: three conversations in and you've learned something no tool could have surfaced.

The energy of being in a room with people who are building is special. I even had an incredible dinner with one of my Speaker Sisters, and it was magical and electric. The next best thing is an online community and live chats.

I also rebuilt my website with Claude Code and Cowork in a few hours. I got the idea for doing the site in Claude during an AI Collective meetup, when another builder showed me the beautiful site they'd built with Claude Code and a GitHub repository.

One builder showing another builder what was possible changed what I tried next.

The thing AI can't replace

I had an experience recently that reinforced how I think about every AI tool I use.

I was working through an assignment for my Master of Science in Data Science. The prompt was to ask three different AI systems questions about faith and spirituality, then compare those conversations to a human interview.

When I asked Claude if God exists, it gave me a beautifully written answer that started with, “we've been conditioned to dismiss felt knowledge as less valid than empirical knowledge.”

I stopped it.

Who is “we”? Because I've never dismissed felt knowledge. I see God in the ocean, in nature, in connectivity. That “we” was Claude defaulting to Western empiricism as if it were universal.

When I pushed back, Claude corrected itself in real time and named it: “My default ‘we’ is the worldview of the people who built me.”

That moment matters for your business. Every output you run through AI carries the assumptions of its training data. Your proposals, your content, your client communications, all of it passes through a default frame that isn't yours unless you actively correct it.

That's why voice references matter. That's why prompt specificity matters. That's why the person driving the tool is the product, not the tool itself.

But here's what I've learned that goes beyond prompts and voice references. The fastest way to get better at catching those defaults, at knowing what's yours and what's the machine's average, is to be around other people who are building.

Not watching tutorials. Not reading threads. Being in rooms, virtual or physical, with people who are deep enough in the tools to compare notes in real time.

Builders need other builders

My favorite places on the internet at the time were communities. Women Build AI was a room full of women actually building, not just talking about building. The Group Chat was where real conversations about what was working and what was breaking in business happened daily. And there was always the Speaker Sister Mic Drop Workshop community for women who use their voices to help people with their message and get paid to do it.

These weren't passive audiences. They were builders. And the difference between consuming content alone and building alongside other people is the difference between guessing and knowing.

In person is another level entirely. I went to The AI Collective's inaugural Chattanooga chapter kickoff and the energy in that room was something a Zoom call couldn't touch. People showing each other what they built on their phones. Comparing workflows. Introducing each other to tools they'd never heard of. Leaving with new ideas and new collaborators.

That same energy applies whether you're at a company onboarding in San Francisco with dozens of people or you're a solo business owner walking into a local meetup with fifteen. The scale is different. The principle is identical.

You learn faster when you're around people who are doing the thing. You build better when someone can look at what you made and tell you what they see that you missed. You stay motivated longer when the evidence of what's possible is sitting across the table from you, not just in a case study you read at midnight.

AI lowered the cost of building, producing content, and delivering some services. What it did not lower was the value of human connection. If anything, it increased it.

Because the tools are available to everyone now, the differentiator isn't access to the tool. It's what you do with it. And what you do with it gets sharper, faster, and more creative when you're in community with other builders.

Tactical AI content can teach you how to use the tools. Community teaches you how to think about the tools.

That second layer is where the real leverage lives.

If this is your kind of conversation, join me for the next Seed & Society® newsletter.