Of everything that happened during my year at DOGE... This is what I’ll remember most. The first time I visited the Retirements Mine, I didn’t know what to expect. Some of the folks there had spent their entire careers inside that mountain. They were understandably cautious about me and the project at first, but they graciously taught me how everything worked. As I learned from them, I started building little tools to make their jobs easier. At first it was small: a button that saved hours of repetitive data entry. Before long, it became entire digital systems that helped them review retirement cases faster. Looking back, I’m grateful to say we built an incredible partnership. It wasn’t just the folks in the Mine, either. Over the past year, I had the privilege of working alongside retirement executives, engineers, and countless career employees. Every one of them played a role in bringing this effort to life. And then, somewhere along the way, visiting the Mine stopped feeling like a work trip. This might sound ridiculous to say, but over time it started to feel more like coming over for Thanksgiving. Except instead of fixing the family printer, it was figuring out how we could get all this paper onto computers. What struck me most came during these last few months. On my more recent trips, I’d set up shop in a conference room, and people would stop by throughout the day just to chat and pitch ideas. One adjudicator (let me know if I can tag you 😉) even had the day off, heard I was in the Mine, and drove all the way in anyway because she wanted to share an idea. And they weren’t asking whether AI was coming. They were pitching ideas for what we should build next. This was a team that had spent decades working with paper. Now here they were, brainstorming how technology and AI could make their work even better. That’s when I realized this effort became real. It wasn't just because we'd gone digital. It was because the people closest to the work were excited to help shape what came next. That’s the kind of thing you can’t fake.