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A few people have asked me recently why I’m building Atttend.

“Why another social platform?”

“Are you trying to compete with Twitter?”

“Why did you move from events to this?”

“And why did you initially say it was for product thinkers, but now it seems like it’s for everyone?”

So I think I should probably explain what I’m actually trying to build.

Atttend has changed quite a bit, but the thing I’ve been trying to solve hasn’t changed as much as it looks.

I’m interested in what happens when people actually think together.

Not just posting something and watching people like it.

Not just putting something in a group chat where the conversation eventually disappears.

Not just writing a finished essay after you’ve already figured everything out.

I wanted somewhere you could put down a thought while it was still a thought.

That’s basically what Atttend is now.

You come in, write a Thought, and people can Agree, Disagree or Extend it.

And I mean actually do those things.

If you agree, explain why.

If you disagree, explain what you think is wrong.

If you extend it, take the idea somewhere else.

So a Thought can start with one person and then turn into a whole chain of thinking.

Someone might make a Thought about AGI.

Someone else disagrees with one part of it.

Another person extends that disagreement from an AI safety perspective.

Someone from neuroscience comes in and takes that somewhere completely different.

Another person agrees with that extension but challenges one of its assumptions.

Now you have this huge tree of thinking around one original idea.

That is the part of Atttend that I’m actually interested in.

And this is also why we built Clusters.

Because I don’t think every Thought needs to be thrown into one giant feed.

You might want to think about AI.

Or AI safety.

Or AGI specifically.

Or something incredibly niche that only a particular group of people understands properly.

So you can create or join a Cluster around that topic.

The Thoughts you make inside that Cluster stay there.

You can see the Cluster on someone’s profile, but the actual thinking stays inside the room.

So now you can have a space where people aren’t just randomly talking about a subject.

They’re actually building on each other’s Thoughts.

And then there’s Tinker.

This is probably one of the parts I’m most excited about.

Because once a Thought has been around for long enough, it can become enormous.

Imagine a Thought with 200 disagreements, 300 agreements and hundreds of extensions.

And then those extensions have their own agreements, disagreements and extensions.

At some point, the thing becomes a massive tree.

You shouldn’t have to read every single branch just to understand what happened.

So we’re building Tinker into every Thought.

When you click Tinker, it reads the Thought and the entire chain around it.

The agreements.

The disagreements.

The extensions.

And instead of giving you a little summary, it produces a Paper that explains what is actually happening in that chain.

Where the original idea came from.

What people agreed with.

Where people disagreed.

How the thinking developed.

Where the different branches went.

And where the conversation currently stands.

And importantly, it cites the actual Thoughts and responses it is talking about.

So if Tinker says someone challenged an argument, you can click straight into that disagreement and continue thinking from there.

The Paper isn’t personalised.

Everyone looking at that Thought gets the same Paper.

Then you can talk to Tinker yourself if you want to understand something differently.

“Explain this part.”

“Why did they disagree here?”

“Explain this without the technical language.”

That is where the AI actually becomes useful to me.

It isn’t replacing the thinking.

It’s helping you navigate the thinking that humans have already done.

And then there’s Briefs.

This is the part of Atttend that is actually going to become the business.

An organisation can come to Atttend with a problem and create a Brief around it.

They can bring together people from completely different fields to work on it.

Maybe they need an AI researcher, a neuroscientist, an engineer, a product designer and someone from another field who sees the problem completely differently.

They all think about the same problem.

They create Thoughts.

They disagree.

They agree.

They extend each other’s ideas.

And eventually you have this entire body of reasoning around the problem.

Then Tinker can turn that into a Paper that explains what the group actually figured out.

So that’s really where Atttend is going.

And I think that’s also why calling it a “social media platform” doesn’t really describe what I’m trying to do.

I’m not trying to build another Twitter.

I’m not trying to get everyone to spend six hours a day scrolling.

And I’m not building specifically for product people anymore because I realised the thing I’m interested in isn’t product thinking.

It’s thinking itself.

The subject can be AI.

Medicine.

Philosophy.

Engineering.

Religion.

Design.

Science.

Whatever.

If there’s something you want to think about deeply with other people, that’s what Atttend is for.

So yeah, the product has changed a lot since the first version.

But I don’t really see it as abandoning one idea for another anymore.

We’re getting closer to the thing I was actually trying to build.

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

~Steve Jobs

I remember writing about this in February.

At the time, I was researching UX3 and Large Blockchain Models, and honestly, I thought I was failing.

I was publishing research about something that almost nobody seemed interested in.

I would write these long papers about why user experience could not always be solved at the interface layer.

Why some systems needed to understand behaviour.

Why machines needed to interpret intent.

Why complexity should be absorbed by infrastructure instead of constantly being pushed back to the user.

I was looking at blockchain because that was the system I was studying.

But looking back at it now, I think I was asking a much bigger question.

How do we build systems that understand humans instead of forcing humans to understand systems?

That was the real beginning of my research journey.

I wasn’t really researching UX in the conventional sense.

I wasn’t going around asking people what button they liked or whether a screen was intuitive.

I was asking the system questions.

Why does the user have to understand this?

Why does this complexity reach the user at all?

Why can’t the system infer what the user is trying to do?

Why should a human have to become an expert just to safely use a piece of technology?

My UX3 research eventually framed this as a problem of where intelligence lives.

If the intelligence lives only in the interface, the user still has to carry the complexity.

If intelligence moves into the system, the system can begin to absorb that complexity before it reaches the user.

That was the idea.

And my Large Blockchain Models research pushed it further.

I was looking at models that could understand behavioural patterns and infer intent from onchain activity, rather than simply giving people more information to interpret.

At the time, it felt extremely niche.

Now I’m watching designers, product people, engineers and AI researchers have conversations about agents, intent, natural language interfaces and systems that can understand what people are trying to accomplish.

And I’m realizing that I wasn’t really researching blockchain UX.

I was researching the relationship between human intention and machine behaviour.

Blockchain was just where I happened to find the problem first.

That’s probably why leaving blockchain ended up being such an important decision for me.

I had spent so much time trying to fit my thinking into an industry that I forgot the industry wasn’t the subject.

The subject was always the thinking.

Now I can look at AI, architecture, finance, software, products, interfaces or whatever else catches my attention and ask the same question:

What happens when the system becomes intelligent enough to understand what the human actually means?

And that changes everything.

It changes what an interface needs to be.

It changes what a designer does.

It changes how products are built.

It changes what engineers have to worry about.

It changes what UX even means.

And maybe the funniest part is that I almost gave up on this research because nobody was reading it.

I got chicken feet and ran. 😂

But I think that’s when I actually became a researcher.

Not when people started reading.

When I kept asking questions nobody around me seemed particularly interested in yet.

I’m still very far from where I want to be.

But I’m finally starting to see the thread.

And that’s a pretty beautiful feeling.

Product (design and strategy)

Engineering (most cracked passer of everything)

Business (most of us don’t know this and fail woefully at it)

Marketing (the most difficult side of building a product)

User experience (it intersects with product and marketing and is the only way to retain users or get them past onboarding)

Finance (the most debilitating part: if you can’t raise and manage funds, your product wouldn’t exist)

You can stay in learning mode forever, but you'll only start improving when you leave and start executing.

You'll keep panicking that you're not good enough yet while people half as good pull ahead. Stop planning and start executing.

You need a thought/execution balance. Overthinkers barely have time to do; overdoers barely have time to think.

No matter how hard you learn or how many videos you watch, you won't really start learning until you execute what you've learnt.

I learnt this the hard way.

For a long time, I thought caffeine was helping me function.

Coffee helped me wake up. Tea helped me work. Caffeine gave me that little push that made starting something easier.

Eventually, I realised something uncomfortable:

I had confused stimulation with functioning.

I have ADHD and I am autistic, and I have spent years using caffeine as a way of changing the state of my brain.

I do not remember exactly when it became a regular part of my life. It was somewhere between two and four years ago. What I do remember is that there was a period when coffee became almost impossible to separate from my daily life.

I was drinking it constantly.

And I was not calm.

I was anxious. I was rushing. I was constantly anticipating something. I had episodes that felt like panic attacks. My stomach would hurt. My sleep was disturbed. I was making decisions from a state of constant activation.

At the same time, I was saying yes to too many things.

I was people-pleasing.

I was entering relationships that I probably would have approached differently if I had been thinking from a calmer state.

I was constantly trying to solve things immediately.

Everything felt urgent.

At the time, I did not understand the connection.

I just thought that was what being productive felt like.

The strange thing about caffeine

Caffeine does not actually give your brain energy in the way we usually describe it.

One of its primary actions is blocking adenosine receptors. Adenosine is involved in the accumulation of sleep pressure and the regulation of wakefulness. By blocking adenosine signalling, caffeine makes you feel less sleepy and more alert. It also affects several other signalling systems involved in arousal and motivation.

That distinction matters.

Caffeine can make you feel more capable of doing something without necessarily making the underlying conditions for good thinking better.

You can be more awake without being more regulated.

You can be more activated without being more focused.

You can be more productive without being calmer.

And I think this distinction is particularly interesting when we talk about ADHD and autism.

Not because autistic or ADHD people should never consume caffeine.

The evidence does not support that claim.

But because both ADHD and autism are associated with sleep difficulties, while caffeine itself can interfere with sleep. Adults with ADHD and autistic adults both show, on average, poorer sleep characteristics than control groups in systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

That creates a potentially important loop:

poor sleep → caffeine → temporary alertness → disrupted sleep → more caffeine → dependence on stimulation → repeat.

And you might not even recognise that you are inside the loop.

I thought I needed stimulation

This was probably the biggest thing I misunderstood.

I thought caffeine was helping me overcome my ADHD.

And there is a reason that idea can feel convincing.

Caffeine is a stimulant. ADHD medications can also be stimulants. There is research investigating caffeine’s effects on ADHD symptoms, including a systematic review of randomised trials in children, but that evidence is nowhere near strong enough to establish caffeine as an ADHD treatment.

The subjective experience can still be compelling.

You drink caffeine.

You become more alert.

You start working.

Your attention seems to lock onto something.

You think:

This is what my brain needed.

But there is another possibility:

Your brain needed less sleepiness, while your nervous system needed less stimulation.

Those are not the same thing.

I think this distinction became obvious to me only after I stopped.

The calm was the strange part

When I finally stopped relying on caffeine, something unexpected happened.

The world became quieter.

Not literally.

Internally.

I could sit with a thought for longer.

I did not feel like everything needed to happen immediately.

I was less interested in responding to every stimulus.

I could think before acting.

And I started noticing how much of my previous life had been lived in a kind of permanent urgency.

That is difficult to explain because caffeine does not necessarily make everyone anxious.

Some people can drink coffee and feel completely fine.

The FDA, for example, notes that up to around 400 mg of caffeine per day is generally not associated with negative effects for most healthy adults, although sensitivity varies considerably between people.

That is important.

This is not an argument that coffee is poison.

It is an argument about individual response.

A 2024 meta-analysis involving healthy participants found that caffeine intake was associated with increased anxiety, with larger effects at higher doses. A 2026 systematic review similarly found evidence of a dose-dependent relationship between caffeine and anxiety, while noting differences between individuals and habitual users.

My experience was extreme enough that I eventually stopped asking:

“How much caffeine is safe?”

and started asking:

“What does caffeine do to me?”

Those are completely different questions.

The sleep problem is bigger than I realised

The most interesting part of this is probably sleep.

Caffeine can remain physiologically relevant long after you stop feeling its obvious effects.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled trials found that caffeine reduced total sleep time, reduced sleep efficiency, increased the time required to fall asleep and reduced deep sleep. One analysis estimated that a standard coffee would need to be consumed roughly nine hours before bedtime to avoid a measurable reduction in total sleep time.

That is remarkable.

You do not have to drink coffee immediately before bed for it to matter.

You can drink it in the afternoon, feel completely normal by bedtime, fall asleep, and still have your sleep affected.

And this matters because sleep is not a minor side effect.

If your sleep is consistently worse, you are changing the conditions under which your brain has to regulate attention, emotion, memory and arousal the next day.

For someone already struggling with attention regulation, that can become particularly relevant.

Then there is dependence

Another thing I underestimated was how normal caffeine dependence can become.

Caffeine withdrawal is a recognised clinical phenomenon. Symptoms can include headache, fatigue, drowsiness, irritability and mood changes. Research suggests withdrawal can begin within roughly 12–24 hours after stopping and may last several days.

That means something strange can happen with habitual caffeine use.

You drink caffeine because it makes you feel better.

Eventually, part of the reason you feel better may simply be that you are reversing the withdrawal state produced by not having it.

So the cycle becomes:

caffeine → adaptation → withdrawal → caffeine → relief.

Research has found that some regular caffeine users meet proposed criteria for clinically meaningful caffeine dependence, although the prevalence and clinical significance remain debated.

That was exactly the part that felt familiar to me.

I was not simply enjoying coffee.

I had reached a point where stopping felt difficult.

And when something becomes difficult to stop even after you have noticed that it is causing problems, it is worth questioning the relationship you have with it.

Why I am particularly interested in ADHD and autism

I want to be careful here.

There is not enough evidence for me to say:

“Caffeine is bad for autistic people.”

There is not enough evidence for me to say:

“Caffeine is bad for people with ADHD.”

Those statements are too broad.

Autism and ADHD are not single physiological states. People experience them differently, have different sleep patterns, different anxiety profiles, different medications, different metabolisms and different sensitivities to stimulants.

But there is a more interesting question.

What happens when you take a psychoactive stimulant and introduce it into a brain that is already struggling with regulation?

That question deserves more attention.

Adults with ADHD and autistic adults both show substantial sleep difficulties in the research literature. Autistic adults also show elevated rates of anxiety, with systematic reviews finding anxiety to be a particularly common co-occurring difficulty.

Meanwhile, caffeine can increase physiological arousal, worsen anxiety in some people and interfere with sleep.

There is no need to assume that autism or ADHD causes someone to respond badly to caffeine.

The interaction is enough to investigate.

The dopamine rush was part of the trap

There was another thing I had to admit to myself.

I liked the feeling.

I liked the rush.

I liked feeling activated.

I liked the sensation that I could suddenly do everything.

And eventually, I started working from that state.

That is probably the part I understand best now.

I had trained myself to associate activation with action.

If I was stimulated, I worked.

If I was under pressure, I moved.

If something felt urgent, I responded.

If someone needed something, I said yes.

If I was tired, I stimulated myself again.

Calmness started to feel like inactivity.

That was the real problem.

Because good thinking does not always feel exciting.

Sometimes good thinking feels boring.

Sometimes it feels slow.

Sometimes it feels like sitting in silence long enough for your brain to actually finish a thought.

I had spent so much time trying to increase my activation that I had forgotten what it felt like to simply be regulated.

I do not think everyone needs to quit caffeine

This is where I think conversations about caffeine usually become unnecessarily simplistic.

One person drinks coffee every morning and feels perfectly fine.

Another person drinks one cup and becomes anxious.

Another person can drink coffee at 10 pm and sleep normally.

Someone else drinks it at 2 pm and sleeps badly.

Caffeine sensitivity varies between people, and factors including genetics, habitual consumption, medications and individual physiology can affect the response.

So I am not interested in telling everyone to stop drinking coffee.

I am interested in asking people to notice what it is actually doing.

Does it make you more focused?

Or merely more activated?

Does it improve your work?

Or does it make you rush through it?

Does it help you sleep less?

Or does it quietly make your sleep worse?

Does it make you calmer and more capable?

Or does it make you feel like everything is urgent?

And most importantly:

Can you stop?

Because that question tells you something that the number of cups you drink might not.

I stopped, and I like my brain better this way

For me, the answer became obvious after I stopped.

I did not suddenly become a different person.

I became less rushed.

And that gave me something I had not realised I was missing:

space.

Space between stimulus and response.

Space between thought and action.

Space to notice when something was a bad idea.

Space to say no.

Space to sleep.

Space to think.

Space to exist without constantly trying to increase my own activation.

I used to think caffeine was helping me get more out of my brain.

Now I wonder whether I was sometimes asking my brain to do too much while simultaneously making it harder for the brain to settle.

That distinction has changed how I think about productivity.

I do not want to spend the rest of my life needing to be stimulated before I can function.

I would rather learn what my brain feels like when it is allowed to operate without constantly pushing it.

For me, that means staying away from caffeine.

Not because caffeine is universally bad.

Not because autistic or ADHD people are incapable of drinking coffee.

And not because everyone needs to follow what worked for me.

I stopped because I finally realised something:

I did not need more stimulation.

I needed to know what my mind felt like without it.

I actually think you’re right about this, but I think there’s something deeper going on.

I used to add “lol” to almost everything I wrote. I still do it. A lot.

For a long time, I thought it was just how I communicated. A habit. Something that made my writing feel less serious or less rigid.

But I started noticing a pattern.

Whenever I feel uncomfortable saying something directly, I’m much more likely to add “lol”.

It doesn’t matter how serious the conversation is. I can be saying something I genuinely mean, something I’ve thought about carefully, and somehow there will be a “lol” sitting at the end of the sentence.

And I realised that, for me, it’s not really about avoiding responsibility.

It’s about being scared of the other person’s reaction.

“Lol” softens the statement.

It makes it less confrontational.

It gives me somewhere to hide if the person doesn’t like what I said.

It’s almost like saying:

“I mean this, but please don’t be angry with me for meaning it.”

And honestly, I think a lot of people do this without even realising it.

Sometimes the little “lol” isn’t there because something is funny.

It’s there because you’re uncomfortable.

You’re trying to make the conversation safer.

You’re trying to soften yourself.

You’re trying to make sure the other person knows you’re not being “too serious”.

For me, I’ve realised that the situations where I use “lol” the most are often the situations where I’m the most uncomfortable.

So now whenever I catch myself doing it, I sometimes stop and ask:

“Why do I feel like I need to soften this?”

Because maybe the “lol” isn’t the point.

Maybe the discomfort underneath it is.

Found this image on twitter and I thought nature can be very beautiful if you’re patient enough to watch it beautify itself.

Do we really need to charge users for using our products?

I support this thought

We need somewhere to atttend. to design thinking problems.

Not just somewhere to share finished designs.

Somewhere to ask:

Why does this product feel difficult to use?

Why do people behave this way?

What are we getting wrong about this experience?

What happens if we look at the problem differently?

Atttend is being rebuilt around this idea.

A collaborative space where people can surface problems, share their thinking, bring evidence, challenge assumptions, and build on each other’s ideas.

Think of the legacy of @nng and @ideo, but in the way @Behance and @dribbble made creative work visible and participatory.

Except the artefact isn’t always a beautiful interface.

Sometimes the artefact is a thought.

And sometimes the most valuable thing you can design is the way we understand the problem.