When I was nineteen I learned HTML from a website called HTML Goodies. The author had a forum, a daily tip, and a writing voice that landed somewhere between an enthusiastic uncle and a mechanic who genuinely loved engines. He told you what tags did. He told you what they didn't do. He told you when to give up and start over.
I built Lisa Land on an orange iMac, freshman year. I was one of the few Mac kids on campus. It was built entirely in frames, and it was a disaster.
That was the first time I shipped something. I have not stopped since.
A year later I was building a university website in Dreamweaver as the webmaster for the BGSU Graduate College. I did not know what Dreamweaver was for in any official sense. I knew that you could click in places and the website would change. I learned that on a Tuesday afternoon between class and dinner. The skill I had wasn't design. The skill I had was a willingness to break things and not panic.
Years later — after a Masters in Organization Development, after twenty years in sales enablement, training and marketing, after enough strategy decks to wallpaper a small bathroom — I got my hands on Claude.
It was my first week at Credo Health, at a leadership offsite. Everyone in the room was researching on their keyboards, and I was trying to learn the team, the dynamics and the job I'd be doing. I was a Copilot and ChatGPT regular. I googled AI, Claude came up, and I thought, let me see if I can figure this out. I downloaded it, paid for it, and handed Nate a full competitor workbook in Slack that same day.
That was the second time I shipped something.
The word "artifice"
People think the word artifice is an insult. It isn't. It comes from the Latin ars + facere — skill plus making. It's the same root that gives us "artisan" and "artist." To do something with artifice is to do it with craft. Clever devices, the dictionary says. The kind of clever a stage magician uses, the kind of clever an old sailor uses to read the wind, the kind of clever a nineteen-year-old uses to make a frames site hold together.
I named my company Artifice & Intelligence because both halves are skills you have to practice. The intelligence is the part that knows what to ask. The artifice is the part that knows how to make the asking land.
The thing nobody tells you is: both of those skills are just attention plus repetition. There's no secret room. There's no academy. There's a workbench, and there's the willingness to keep showing up to it.
The witchy part
Yes, I'm a little witchy. I read birth charts the way other people read book reviews — for the shape of a person, not for prophecy. I use StrengthsFinder and Myers-Briggs the same way. I'm not interested in horoscopes. I'm interested in patterns.
The story I keep telling myself is that the witches in old stories were the women who paid attention. They knew which plants did which things because they had time and curiosity and a willingness to be wrong. They knew their neighbors. They watched the weather. They wrote things down. They were practitioners. The "magic" was a thousand small observations stacked on top of each other until the stack started to lean toward the truth.
I'm trying to do that with AI. Watch what works. Write it down. Tell other people. Don't be precious about it. Don't dress it up. The work is the work.
What this book is for
I'm writing this to the woman in the airport with a notebook open and four browser tabs of AI courses she hasn't started. I'm writing it to the founder who feels like they're falling behind. I'm writing it to the marketer who's been told for two years now that everything is changing and is exhausted from waiting for the future to settle into a shape you can plan around.
The future is not coming. It's already here. It just hasn't been written down in a way that's useful to you yet.
That's what I'm doing now. Writing it down. The way HTML Goodies did for me, on an orange iMac, freshman year. With patience. With small detours. With a willingness to be wrong in public so you can be right in private.
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Continued in chapter two: The Bench.
— L.
