Ten meetups in. About 20 of us at Alt_PingRiver (thanks to owner John Ho) and the room has settled into a real mix — technologists, educators, consultants, a financial planner, and several people who said plainly at the start that they didn’t know what an “agent,” an “LLM,” or a “harness” was. That honesty made the session better than any framing could have.
The question that keeps coming up:
“How do you take what’s genuinely useful from AI without handing over your attention, your judgment, or your capacity to think for yourself?”
Attention, then architecture
We opened with the practice rather than the framework. Notice the next time you reach for your phone, and ask whether the impulse came from a real need or from a groove worn smooth by habit. A conscious technologist is someone conscious of their own behavior. In the moment, and acts. Everything else is reps.
Then the “middle way.” Competing with modern systems on throughput is a losing game — as mentioned during the session, “If you are trying to optimize yourself for increased productivity, you will lose.” What’s actually available is a decision about what to hand over and what to keep doing yourself.
What people built & showed
One of our regulars, Shayne, has been in Thailand 16 years and now builds websites with AI. He demoed a dashboard that puts every website he manages into one view; adding a new site to it takes him only minutes now. When Thailand’s visa rules changed this month, he had roughly sixty pages of visa information across two sites to update. It took him about 10 minutes. “If I had a WordPress website,” he said, “I’d still be changing them.” He also built an entire Chinese-language teaching site in half an hour, because someone asked.
We then had Armando demo SloMo. SloMo replaces mindless scrolling with a healthy speed bump: finish a workout challenge or wait out a Time Lock before your chosen apps open again. Armando was kind enough to share that he was inspired by one of our Screen Time activities in Meetup #9.
I shared a micro-app for Conscious Stack, which was shipped over the weekend after a flurry of Notion interactions on X. You paste in any tool’s URL, it pulls the favicon and details automatically, and you slot it into your anchor, active, or supporting layer (the 1:3:5 structure found in Conscious Stack Design™). Seeing the stack as a picture makes the constraint obvious in a way a list never does.
Industry news
The news segment ran long, as it does with our group. Grok Agents that spin up their own virtual machines. Meta’s quiet entry with Muse, and the data moat behind it that no other vendor can match. And a growing sense that AI products are becoming interchangeable at the surface — the real difference is the data, integrations, and community wrapped around the model.
I mentioned I canceled my ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions last October and now run everything through Notion, switching between US and Chinese models as the task warrants. Leslie, a financial planner, asked about AI bookkeeping. Xero now has an MCP integration, so a bookkeeping agent that reconciles accounts and checks receipts is genuinely within reach.
The 1:3:5, and closing loops
We revisited the Conscious Stack™ — one anchor, three active, five supporting — as a response to bounded working memory rather than a productivity trick. You can’t hold twelve tools in your head at once, so choose the set you can actually explain. One participant shared 9 as a practical ceiling for categories like active contacts. Symbolic or not, the lesson held: technology constantly opens loops, and conscious practice requires closing some (or all).
What we’re still working out
Towards the end of the night, someone asked the sharpest question: how do you quantify what a conscious technologist actually does? The room leaned toward behavior change over course completion — reduced screen time, a stable anchor tool held for ninety days, showing up. Anyone can use Notion; not everyone becomes a certified Notion consultant. So perhaps the same might apply for what we’re building with this Conscious Technologist (CT) movement — anyone can start becoming a CT, not everyone will be certified. We don’t have the definition down pat yet, but we’re not pretending to — it will come.
The best test anyone offered was simpler. If you genuinely understand a system, you should be able to explain it clearly without AI doing the explaining for you. That’s a whiteboard test you can run on yourself in 30 seconds.
We ran well past the end, and then a mini-workshop broke out in the room because nobody wanted to leave 😅
Next meetup is Oct 2nd (register here). If you’re in Chiang Mai, come. And if you aren’t — join our next global virtual meetup on Oct 1st (register here). If you wish to get access to our slide deck, or connect with the Chiang Mai subgroup, join our community here.
