Writing
AI controls, agent systems, banking governance, production practice. 404 essays, newest first.
- 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.
- Governing Agents the Way Cells Govern Themselves
Six cell biology mechanisms that reveal what the networking 'control plane' metaphor misses about governing AI agents.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- When Your AI Advisor Is Also Your AI Vendor's Partner
What does the Frontier Alliance actually mean for advice quality?
- Progressive Disclosure for AI Agents
Search returns summaries. Get returns detail. The model decides what to expand. 75% context savings.
- 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.
- The Failures That Look Like Success
The most dangerous AI failures are the ones that look fine on the surface.
- The Fairness Impossibility Is Not a Bug
Every AI fairness debate is secretly a values debate disguised as a technical question.
- The Four Layers of Every AI Agent
Interaction, inference, orchestration, tooling. The boundaries between them must be enforcement points, not design principles.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Specificity Trap
Adding detail to a deliverable doesn't fix credibility — it creates new interrogation targets.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Pipeline Paradox
Monitoring systems need consumers before they need features
- 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.
- 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.
- Agentic Search Ate RAG
When AI agents can grep, read, and reason iteratively, most RAG infrastructure becomes unnecessary middleware.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Interlocutor Mode
Most people use AI transactionally. The real unlock is conversational — thinking with the model, not through it.
- Reconstruction Over Retrieval
In a world where AI has perfect recall, the skill that matters is rebuilding frameworks from first principles — not memorising them.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Knowledge Mining Gap
Most knowledge workers use LLMs as search engines. The real unlock is using them as subject matter experts you debrief.
- Good Enough Parrots
The philosophical debate about whether LLMs understand is orthogonal to whether they're useful for knowledge extraction.
- Systematise Decisions, Not Actions
Actions are cheap to redo. Bad decisions compound. Build systems around the judgment calls, not the mechanical steps.
- 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.
- 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.
- Default to the Whole Conversation
When AI tools search conversation history, they should index both sides by default — not just the human's half.
- 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.