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Writing

Writing

AI controls, agent systems, banking governance, production practice. 404 essays, newest first.

  1. AI Controls Architecture

    Risk teams know risk. The open problem is designing controls for systems that are non-deterministic, probabilistic, and attackable in natural language.

  2. Governing Agents the Way Cells Govern Themselves

    Six cell biology mechanisms that reveal what the networking 'control plane' metaphor misses about governing AI agents.

  3. The Risk Without an Engineering Solution

    Every other agentic AI risk has an engineering answer. Prompt injection doesn't. That changes everything about how you design controls.

2026
  1. Local-First Embeddings for Regulated Industries

    24MB download, <100ms per batch, nothing leaves the machine. For banks with air-gapped environments, this changes the conversation.

  2. Model Routing Is a Design Decision

    Your AI budget question isn't which model — it's which phase of the workflow needs depth, and which just needs speed.

  3. When Your AI Advisor Is Also Your AI Vendor's Partner

    What does the Frontier Alliance actually mean for advice quality?

  4. Progressive Disclosure for AI Agents

    Search returns summaries. Get returns detail. The model decides what to expand. 75% context savings.

  5. Shadow Agents Are Coming for Your Org

    Open-source agent adoption can outpace enterprise security controls by weeks. Governance teams need a policy before the agents arrive uninvited.

  6. The Failures That Look Like Success

    The most dangerous AI failures are the ones that look fine on the surface.

  7. The Fairness Impossibility Is Not a Bug

    Every AI fairness debate is secretly a values debate disguised as a technical question.

  8. The Four Layers of Every AI Agent

    Interaction, inference, orchestration, tooling. The boundaries between them must be enforcement points, not design principles.

  9. The Integration Layer Is the Moat

    MCP decouples the tool from the model. Once that happens, the durable asset isn't the model — it's which systems you've exposed.

  10. The Production Gap: Why AI Pilots Fail

    The consulting question isn't how to build AI — it's how to get it past the 62% graveyard.

  11. The Specificity Trap

    Adding detail to a deliverable doesn't fix credibility — it creates new interrogation targets.

  12. What Chinese AI Labs See That Western Ones Don't

    A strand of multi-agent research — latent-space inter-agent communication — is thriving in Chinese labs and almost invisible in the West.

  13. Your AI Roadmap Is Already Obsolete

    A 3-year AI roadmap designed around today's model capabilities may be solving last year's problem by year 2.

  14. The Pipeline Paradox

    Monitoring systems need consumers before they need features

  15. The Annotation Model: What AI Journaling Gets Right

    Most AI writing tools want to chat with you. The better model is annotation — AI that reads what you wrote and leaves margin notes.

  16. When Your Life OS Becomes the Life

    The real risk of building a personal AI operating system isn't that a better tool appears — it's that your system's complexity becomes the thing you maintain instead of the thing that maintains you.

  17. Agentic Search Ate RAG

    When AI agents can grep, read, and reason iteratively, most RAG infrastructure becomes unnecessary middleware.

  18. Don't Optimise for the Proxy

    When you have both a credential and real work in the same domain, route effort through the real work.

  19. The AI Trading System You Should Build But Never Use

    The best use of AI in investing isn't picking stocks — it's building the pipeline that teaches you why you can't.

  20. The Interlocutor Mode

    Most people use AI transactionally. The real unlock is conversational — thinking with the model, not through it.

  21. Reconstruction Over Retrieval

    In a world where AI has perfect recall, the skill that matters is rebuilding frameworks from first principles — not memorising them.

  22. No Stable Moat

    Every layer humans retreat to, AI follows. The question isn't what we're still good at — it's what we teach the next generation when every cognitive advantage has a shelf life.

  23. What the Weights Don't Know

    The value of having read everything is collapsing toward zero. What's left is what you can't extract from a model.

  24. The Knowledge Mining Gap

    Most knowledge workers use LLMs as search engines. The real unlock is using them as subject matter experts you debrief.

  25. Good Enough Parrots

    The philosophical debate about whether LLMs understand is orthogonal to whether they're useful for knowledge extraction.

  26. Systematise Decisions, Not Actions

    Actions are cheap to redo. Bad decisions compound. Build systems around the judgment calls, not the mechanical steps.

  27. Spaced Repetition for Beliefs

    Most people do spaced repetition for facts but not for beliefs about themselves. Wrong priors calcify because there's no review system.

  28. I Made AI Remember to Remember

    Most AI memory is either always-on or ephemeral. The missing category is prospective: remember until a context arises, then forget.

  29. Default to the Whole Conversation

    When AI tools search conversation history, they should index both sides by default — not just the human's half.

  30. Save Conclusions, Not Just Rules

    When an answer requires multi-step reasoning to reach, save the conclusion — a fresh start won't reliably reproduce the chain.