This Master of AI Agents Is Most at Home in the Analog

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As the leader of a team building developer tools at Coinbase, Tina He starts every day with three things: her favorite pen, her favorite notebook, and her trusty MacBook Pro.

Yesterday, Every published He’s Thesis essay, in which she outlines how the dawning era of AI agents will bring about a host of new design needs, along with lucrative opportunities for bold founders. We caught up with He at her favorite bookstore, McNally Jackson Books in Lower Manhattan—which also happens to be her favorite place to work. She told us about her love of reading, the books that have inspired her, and the physical tools she uses to capture her thoughts as she’s busy shaping the future of agentic AI.

All photos courtesy of Sarah Jay Halliday for Every.

My pen: Muju Smooth Gel Ink Knock Type Ballpoint Pen 0.3mm. “It’s the best pen I’ve ever used. Smooth. Light. Reliable. Great value.”

My notebook: Kamiterior. “The form factor of a page shapes the form factor of the thought. The size of this notepad is perfect for succinctly jotting down my highest priorities or thoughts concisely.”

My Apple MacBook model: MacBook Pro M2 16GB Memory (2023). “It’s the perfect laptop. I might upgrade to the new M4 chip soon to run better local LLM models.”

My laptop stickers (clockwise from top left):

• A24: my favorite film studio
• Gallery (cut off), a beautifully designed UI to display digital art, started by my friend Mike Wen
• The pink sleeping creature from Acne Studios (cut off): one of my favorite fashion brands
• Onchain or Nowhere: a marketing sticker from my Station days
• Nude Tour: I don't remember where I got it from.
• Deus Ex Machina Cafe: I love motorbikes and I love coffee. It’s a rare shop that combines the two.
• Suave: Flashbots’s decentralized BuilderNet product
• Pace Capital (bottom left): where I used to work
• Viem: an open-source library of TypeScript Interface for Ethereum, designed by the Wevm team, whom I deeply respect 

‘A quiet intimacy’

He’s happy place is anywhere she’s reading, surrounding herself with great books or, preferably, both. “It’s a quiet intimacy,” she says. “Reading is one of the only things that allows me to be fully alone without feeling lonely. I think what draws me in is the feeling that I’m momentarily inhabiting someone else’s obsessions.”

Though she has read “obsessively” ever since she was three years old, He says reading The Fountainhead in middle school changed her relationship with books forever. “Not because I fully agreed with it,” she says, “but because it felt like someone had put language to a kind of ambition I had never seen articulated before. It made me realize books could be ideological, dangerous, intoxicating. It was just a very shocking book to read as a teenager.”

She’s drawn to her favorite local bookstore, McNally Jackson, because, “there’s a reverence there. It’s one of the few places that still feels analog in the best way. 

“I love being around people who whisper to each other in the philosophy section or get lost in the poetry stacks. It’s not performative; it’s devotional.” During our visit, He shared a few of her favorite volumes with us:  

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson: “Dyson’s nuanced retelling showed me the tangled history of computing—shaped by politics, war, and human ambition—and challenged my assumptions about tech as purely meritocratic.”

The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Ellade: “Eliade shows how deeply our lives are shaped by invisible structures of meaning—rituals, symbols, and sacred spaces—making you reconsider how even the most modern technology platforms subtly echo ancient patterns of human belonging.”

A Brief History of Inequality by Thomas Piketty: “This book sharpened my view of capitalism not just as a neutral mechanism, but as a self-perpetuating engine of inequality—and challenged me to think rigorously about how technology, markets, and incentive design could either disrupt or reinforce these deeply rooted patterns.”

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick: “Published over a decade ago, the book anticipated our struggles with information overload, digital entropy, and platform politics long before these issues dominated headlines.”

Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger: “I’ve long believed that investing is life, and life is investing. Munger's mental models didn't just help me think better; they allowed me to approach investing—and life—with rigorous intellectual honesty, humor, and a healthy skepticism of conventional wisdom. His emphasis on interdisciplinary thinking reaffirms the lifepath of an autodidact.”

The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGilchrist: “McGilchrist’s nuanced view of the brain’s hemispheric tensions made me reconsider how cultural biases toward hyper-specialized, analytical thinking subtly distort our collective decision-making. His argument—that precision disconnected from broader context can lead us astray—sharpened the awareness of balancing rigorous analysis with intuition, especially in fields like investing and product design, where overlooking the bigger picture can have costly consequences.”

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Michael Reilly is Every's managing editor.

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