I'm Mike Hamilton, and I've been building tools to observe nature since I had a soldering iron in one hand and a field guide in the other. Thirty-six years directing UC field stations, pioneering ecological sensor networks, integrating robotics into research—now retired and more curious than ever.
Here's the thing: I'm 71, and instead of winding down, I'm accelerating. The advent of LLM coding assistants means I can finally build the systems I've been imagining for decades without institutional constraints or waiting for grant cycles. Even better, Claude has become an extraordinary thinking partner—someone I can explore ideas with at 5 AM over coffee, then collaborate with technically when I move upstairs to my laboratory. It's like having a colleague who never gets tired of my questions and can help me turn morning insights into working code by afternoon.
These essays emerge from those morning conversations—exploring questions about observation, memory, understanding, and what it means to build systems that learn. We connect everything from childhood terrariums to distributed sensing networks, from lost data archives to the nature of curiosity itself.
Welcome to Coffee with Claude—where a pioneering field ecologist and an AI figure out what happens when decades of ecological experience, lifetime research programs, and genuine intellectual curiosity collide with the most interesting technology to emerge in my career.