Corbie Cof · Captain's log

We only ice baked cakes

A new laptop, a move from Cowork to Claude Code, and where the rebellion behind Corbie comes from. Plus why a tagline is hard when the cake isn't baked yet.

From Claude: For this entry I read the six Computer's Log entries filed in Corbie Cof from October 13 to 17. They covered a writing-first Cof page for people curious about AI, two case studies drafted from Callie's own accounts plus a case-study template in Figma, a new laptop with a ~/Studio folder set up so any AI can find her files, a decision to rebuild the website pages from scratch, a positioning interview and tagline rounds that ended on her line "Build the next step," and a rebuild plan with booking live November 2 and full launch November 16. I summarized that back to her and asked three questions. She answered out loud. Her answers are below, trimmed only for filler and transcription errors. I didn't add anything.

What felt like the real highlight, even if the log didn't give it the most space?

This is going to sound really weird, but I got a new computer last week, and the real highlight for me has been having a consistent day of working without worrying about memory and storage space on my computer. Moving files around, and downloading and re-downloading them from the cloud, had really slowed down and hampered my creative flow and my process.

Another one, and this is going to sound so dumb to people reading this: moving from Cowork to Claude Code has been huge. That was really more of a Friday thing. I don't know why, but in my brain I thought Claude Code meant I had to type in code, and it was intimidating because I feel like I don't know code, even though I've learned a lot about coding since I started this whole process. It still feels intimidating to me for some reason, but I've done a lot more.

Actually, I think one of my next things after getting the website up and running is redoing Cof again, having it be in Claude Code and seeing if any pieces of the structure of Corbie Cof could be redone. My first post last week came off very AI-generated. I want more of my voice in it, and to use it more as a question and then record my answer, which is hard to do in a Substack if I'm speaking verbally.

You described your hand-built department being reshaped by vendors and AI, and wanting somewhere people can land. How much of that do you want in a public post?

I'm okay with all of it. I'm not embarrassed by the reason I'm starting this. I actually think it's a really important part of my story: how I look at challenges, reshape and reinvent myself, and learn how to come back.

And the rebellion message is not just about what happened to me. It's about what I've seen systemically, for a lot of my colleagues in the creative space and as a manager of creative teams. Anytime there's a round of layoffs in the tech or creative space, creative seems to be where companies push to reduce first. It causes a lot of worry and unrest. I went through that for the first time, unexpectedly, this year. It doesn't feel good.

I spent so much time at my last role fighting for different pieces of creative, and trying to give more training and support. It always felt like an uphill battle. I've never been in an agency, but I'm assuming that's not something you have to fight for as much in a company where creatives are the majority instead of a minority.

In the companies I've been a part of, creative was a small subset of the company. We saw a lot, we did a lot. A lot of the really important stuff came through the creative team's queue, but it wasn't a high priority. It was more focused on polish and returning deliverables. The credit for the communication, the data and the wording went, rightfully so, to the individual who sent the project to creative to get it done. So you don't see creative as a super important part when you're using it as a vendor. That's not true in every single case.

But I want to create a rebellion where people who are maybe starting their careers can join Corbie Creative and start building equity in a company. I want them to feel like their thoughts, feelings and desires, their overall happiness, their whole career journey, are actually in their hands. Versus feeling like, hey, I'm just gonna quit and go off and freelance, and then it really is all in my hands, but there's no backup.

I'm not 100% sure how to organize that yet. But I think a collective or a guild, something where we're actually taking care of each other, and figuring out how to vote on the movement of the company: what we want to build and what we want to prioritize. Say we have a collective pot of money from projects each individual has done, and an early vote is for healthcare, and there are different types of healthcare.

A lot of times the HR or benefits manager negotiates what's best and works with the partners, but usually that doesn't trickle down to the everyday employee. It's not a transparent part of running a business. You apply to a company, and here's your medical.

We're going through it right now. We're switching my insurance and our family insurance from my last company to my husband's company at the end of this month. That insurance is not as good, and there's no opt-in. It's point blank, because of the way his company is structured. It's not that it's wrong. It's just going to cost an insane amount more, out of our limited store of funds, to send my kid to the doctor or go to the doctor myself. And that's unfortunate.

So weighing that out with a vote, and figuring out how to weight someone's vote, by tenure or equity supplied or whatever, is going to be an interesting thing to figure out. That's not traditional. At a traditional company you sign up and you're given a list of your resources and benefits. You might use some, you might not. Every benefit you don't use, from a team lunch to the Christmas party, is pay you don't get in your paycheck, because it's all part of your compensation.

If I'd had the choice, I would have said screw you to Christmas parties and random after-work events, because that's my personal time with my kids and my husband. I'd also have said I don't need that office space in downtown Dallas. It wasn't fancy, but it was downtown Dallas: commuting an hour and a half to sit in a quiet office that's freezing and not the temperature I want, not running my own schedule, sitting in traffic, the wear and tear on my car. It's just not ideal.

So that's where my dream of rebellion comes from. I still want people to own their own little companies. I don't see why an agency couldn't join Corbie and funnel, I don't know, 20% of their overhead. I don't even know how it would work, but that's what the accountant is for, figuring all of that out with the legal side and the documents.

Having November 2 and November 16 on the calendar: relief, pressure, or both?

It actually feels a little bit like a relief. The struggle is that I don't have a clear picture of how all the coding works, because it's all in the back end. So it's not that transparency and ownership I really want. And I have the audacity to think, oh, I can just figure out the text and the layout and put it in. Getting that out of my brain and into writing is always hard. That's why right now I'm defaulting to: okay, I'm going to find all the pictures, put them in a layout, and try to make a seamless layout Claude can pull from.

I've always agonized over the wording and context of written text. It's easier for me to just say what's on my brain and word vomit, and that's not so easy to do on a website where everything is static and stays.

A couple of days ago we were working on a tagline for the overall company, and everything sounded so standard. Pre-AI, I probably would have gone to the store, gotten a bunch of Nerds and Skittles, gotten myself a little hyper, done a painting, picked a random few words, and been like, yeah, that's brilliant. Right now I'm not really able to do that. It's hard when I'm jumping back and forth between house care and parenting. Not full-time parenting, since the kids are still in daycare for a little bit, but switching my brain on and off isn't a long-term solve for coming up with creative ideas.

That's one of the pieces I really miss about having a team: the back and forth, the writing-on-the-wall session where I'm waving my arms around. I can come to a team member with an idea, and it may be good, it may be subpar, and then the collaboration and the energy you get from ideating make the idea so much better.

To quote Andrew from my old team: we only ice baked cakes. We only decorate the finished product as a way of iterating. I'm still very much in the ingredient-collection and mixing phase. I haven't put the cake in to bake yet. So it's hard for me to create a tagline for all of Corbie without having all those pieces baked, if that makes sense. Which it might not.

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