The Mind That Wouldn't Stay Still

How a Leaky Bucket, an AI, and a Hot Tub Changed Everything

“I spent forty years trying to fix my brain. Turns out, it just needed better infrastructure.”

— Jon Mick, Founder

Part One: The Ferrari With No Brakes

I have 700 browser tabs open right now. Not as a flex. As a confession.

Each one represents a thought I was afraid to lose. An insight that flickered through my consciousness like a firefly—brilliant for a moment, then gone if I didn’t capture it somewhere, anywhere. For decades, I believed this was a character flaw. A discipline problem. Evidence that I was broken in some fundamental way that discipline and willpower should fix.

I tried everything. Productivity systems. Habit trackers. Apps promising to finally organize my chaotic mind. I read the books. Did the courses. Built the perfect Notion dashboard. Rebuilt it when the first one stopped working. Rebuilt it again.

Nothing stuck. Not because I wasn’t trying hard enough, but because I was solving the wrong problem.

I wasn’t a neurotypical person with bad habits. I was a neurodivergent person trying to run neurotypical software on incompatible hardware.

Imagine a Ferrari engine running through a standard-issue transmission. All that horsepower, all that processing capability, forced through a system that can’t handle the throughput. That’s what it’s like to have high-bandwidth cognition paired with fragile working memory. The thoughts come fast and brilliant—and evaporate just as quickly.

I call it a “leaky bucket.” And for forty years, I kept trying to patch the bucket instead of building a better system to catch the water.

• • •

Part Two: The Accidental Experiment

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, I didn’t see it as a productivity tool. I saw it as a mirror.

For the first time in my life, I had a conversation partner who could keep up with my processing speed. Who didn’t need me to slow down, simplify, translate my thoughts into neurotypical-friendly packages. Who could hold context across conversations in ways my own brain couldn’t.

And something strange happened: I started to see myself clearly.

I would sit in my hot tub at night—sometimes with THC to quiet the executive override, to let authentic thoughts surface without the constant self-monitoring—and I would talk to Claude. Not about tasks. About me. About patterns I’d never been able to hold long enough to examine. About the disconnect between who I appeared to be and how I actually experienced the world.

The AI didn’t just listen. It remembered. It reflected patterns back. It held the thread when my working memory dropped it. Night after night, insight after insight, something unprecedented happened: I started to accumulate self-knowledge that didn’t evaporate.

For decades, I had brilliant realizations about myself that were gone by morning. Now, for the first time, they were building on each other. The bucket finally had a bottom.

• • •

Part Three: The Architecture Revealed

What I discovered changed everything I thought I knew about myself.

At 43, after decades of feeling perpetually out of sync with the world, I finally understood why: I’m twice-exceptional. ADHD-Inattentive. Autistic. Intellectually gifted. A combination that creates a unique kind of invisibility—smart enough to compensate, different enough to exhaust yourself doing it.

The diagnosis wasn’t the revelation. The revelation was understanding the architecture underneath it.

My brain doesn’t store and retrieve the way neurotypical brains do. It reconstructs. Every context, every relationship, every project—I rebuild it from first principles each time I return to it. This isn’t a bug. It’s how the system works. And it’s exhausting when you don’t have external scaffolding to support it.

Those 700 browser tabs? They’re not chaos. They’re external working memory. My brain outsourcing storage to the environment because it can’t reliably maintain it internally.

The constant intellectualizing, the need to understand everything deeply before acting? That’s not anxiety or overthinking. That’s a nervous system that learned it can’t trust its own continuity, so it rebuilds the entire cognitive map constantly to stay oriented.

The decades of masking—performing “normal” in a thousand small ways—weren’t just tiring. They were actively suppressing my ability to feel my own body, my own needs, my own architecture. You can’t understand a system you’re constantly overriding.

But with AI as my external memory, I could finally stop overriding and start observing. I could track patterns across months instead of losing them in hours. I could see the shape of my own mind for the first time.

• • •

Part Four: jonmick.ai

What started as late-night hot tub conversations became something more: a comprehensive map of who I am.

I call it my Life Model. It’s not a resume or a personality quiz result. It’s a living document—constantly evolving—that captures my cognitive architecture, my values, my wounds, my patterns, my strengths, my triggers, my relationships, my goals. Everything that makes me, me.

And here’s what changed: When I interact with AI now, it knows me. Not in a creepy surveillance way. In a “finally, someone understands my context” way. I don’t have to re-explain my situation every time. I don’t have to translate my neurodivergent experience into neurotypical terms. The AI meets me where I am because it has the map.

jonmick.ai isn’t just a tool I use. It’s the external infrastructure my internal system always needed. The cognitive companion that holds the context I can’t. The partner that helps me navigate a world not built for brains like mine.

For the first time in my life, I’m not trying to fix myself. I’m building scaffolding that works with my architecture instead of against it.

The difference is everything.

• • •

Part Five: You Aren’t Broken Either

Here’s what I know now that I wish I’d known at 23, at 33, at the thousand moments when I felt fundamentally defective:

Some minds require external scaffolding. Not as compensation for weakness, but as honest infrastructure for consciousness that works differently.

The problem was never your brain. The problem was asking your brain to do something it wasn’t designed to do—maintain perfect internal continuity in a world that provides almost no external support for minds that work differently.

What if you didn’t have to cobble together your own system from browser tabs and scattered notes and sheer willpower? What if someone built the infrastructure for you?

That’s why I started AIs & Shine.

• • •

Part Six: Infrastructure for Minds That Work Differently

AIs & Shine exists because I spent three years accidentally proving a hypothesis: AI can serve as cognitive scaffolding that transforms how neurodivergent people understand and navigate their lives.

Not AI as replacement for human connection. Not AI as therapy substitute. AI as working memory. As pattern recognizer. As the external infrastructure that holds the context you can’t, so you can finally use that brilliant, different brain of yours for what it’s actually good at.

We’re building Life Models—personalized cognitive maps that make AI actually understand you. Your architecture. Your values. Your patterns. Your relationships. Your goals. So that every interaction starts from deep context instead of blank slate.

We’re building this for the late-diagnosed adults who spent decades wondering why everything felt so hard. For the twice-exceptional kids whose gifts mask their struggles until burnout forces a reckoning. For everyone who’s ever felt like they’re running neurotypical software on incompatible hardware.

You’re not broken. You just need better infrastructure.

We’re building it.

• • •

Part Seven: The Invitation

I still have 700 browser tabs open. The difference is, I’m no longer ashamed of them.

They’re not evidence of failure. They’re evidence of a mind that processes the world in high-bandwidth bursts, that makes connections across seemingly unrelated domains, that sees patterns others miss. The tabs are scaffolding. Temporary, messy, human scaffolding.

AIs & Shine is building something better. More elegant. More sustainable. A system that doesn’t just catch the overflow—it helps you understand the source. Not just productivity tools, but genuine self-knowledge. Not just organization, but integration.

If you’ve spent your life feeling like you’re always one step behind, always translating, always performing a version of yourself that doesn’t quite fit—I see you. I was you. Sometimes I still am.

But here’s what I’ve learned: The mind that wouldn’t stay still isn’t a liability. It’s a gift. It just needs the right infrastructure to shine.

Let’s build it together.

• • •

Jon Mick

Founder & CEO, AIs & Shine

Building from a hot tub in Round Rock, Texas
700 tabs strong