Now

What I'm doing now

Updated  ·  Rick Cusick, Burlington, Vermont

Work

I’m CTO of Boothby Therapy Services, which serves public schools. Most of my attention goes to AI adoption: hands-on training for our staff and therapy providers, our Responsible Use of AI policy, and internal tools I build with Claude Code.

The lesson I keep relearning: people adopt AI when they trust the rules and see it help with their own work. Training on real tasks does more than big announcements.

Building

  • A widget/library to detect and protect/obfuscate PII from being sent to LLMs, while leveraging their capabilities to improve workflows.
  • isthiscool.com, a taste-mapping app I’m building with my brother Bill.
  • Custom Claude skills that take recurring chores off my plate.
  • Small experiments with AI agents, to stay close to what the tools can actually do.

Writing

  • Revising Sen, my novel inspired by the Mahabharata and the first book of Daughters of Dharma.
  • Working on a collection of short stories “The Afterlife Rules”, one of which I shared in a recent blog post [Those Who Remember] (https://rickcusick.com/blog/those-who-remember/)

Thinking about

What happens to strategy when AI can draw the map. I keep returning to Wardley Maps and Cynefin to make sense of it. Does AI mean that Wardley maps no longer make sense? Does cognition-as-a-service break models of “innovation within capitalism”?

This is a now page, an idea from Derek Sivers. It says what I'm focused on at this point in my life. If you're reading this long after the date above, I'm probably doing something else.