Altered Craft is written by Sam Keen, former lead architect in AWS’s GenAI innovation lab, author of Clean Architecture with Python (Packt, 2025), and co-lead of Portland AI Engineers (1,100+ members). After 25 years shipping production software at startups, Nike, Lululemon, and AWS, I now research and write full-time about AI’s impact on the craft of software development.
Altered Craft is a newsletter for developers navigating AI’s disruption of that craft. Each week combines a current-events review edition with a deeper implementation dive, delivering production-grounded technical patterns alongside the career context most AI content skips entirely. The honest middle ground between substance and hype, documented through hands-on experiments.
Altered Craft was formerly know as DevThink. See the archive
This newsletter is one piece of a larger platform. For workshops, advisory services, and the full story:
Questions? sam@alteredcraft.com · LinkedIn
Altered Craft’s AI usage poliy
TL;DR: I use it.
Weekly Review editions: These have always been an artifact of me spending too much time on the internet, reading posts on AI. From that I curate a list of post that I feel bring signal through the noise. I build this list during the week, and then run it through an AI system to summarize and stitch together in an engaging manner. My hope is that weekly, these help you to navigate all the hype and noise around AI.
Longer Form Writing and Notes: These are 100% derived and researched by a human (me). In this case AI is my chief editor. It of course takes care of spelling and grammar for me. In addition it helps me to hold to a desired ‘voice’. I ask it to insure my writing is inclusive, that I am structuring arguments in a relatable manner, and not showing an overly biased point of view.
