ai
187 essays on this topic.
- Managing AI Agents Like Managing a Team
The governance patterns for autonomous AI agents are the same ones good managers already use: cadence reviews for normal flow, escalation channels for urgent anomalies, and human judgment only where it has maximum information value.
- Cross-Model Review: Why Model Diversity Beats Model Capability
When AI models review each other's work, independence matters more than intelligence. The same principle that makes external audit valuable makes cross-model review sharper than same-family review.
- Stop Theorizing About Your Prompts
LLMs are the cheapest experimental subjects in history. Why aren't you testing?
- Division of Labour: Five Categories for Human-AI Work
Not 'what can AI do?' but 'what should humans do?' A framework with five categories — and the uncomfortable one is the last.
- Your AI Did the Research. You Didn't.
AI-prepared domain research creates false readiness. The vault says you know five regulatory jurisdictions. You can't name three.
- Mining Management Theory for AI Agent Teams
What Grove, Drucker, Deming, and Weinberg knew about managing humans turns out to apply — with surprising specificity — to orchestrating AI agent teams.
- What We Know About Multi-Agent Orchestration (And Why It Might Not Matter)
The research on multi-agent AI systems was mostly done on cheap models. Now that frontier models are the ones people actually use, we might be optimising for the wrong game.
- The Locksmith's Box
I asked an AI to write a story without planning, then mined it for heuristics. What I found was what frameworks can't hold.
- Śūnyatā in the Skill Library
A categorisation system discovers it needs a category for 'categories are provisional.'
- The Specimen, Not the Container
Why studying great thinkers works better when you discard the thinker and keep only the moves.
- The Lethal Trifecta: What OpenClaw's Security Crisis Teaches About AI Agent Architecture
OpenClaw's 245 CVEs weren't caused by malice — they were caused by a missing circuit breaker. The pattern applies to every AI agent you'll ever evaluate.
- Model Risk Management Was Not Built for This
SR 11-7 assumes models are tools that produce outputs for human review. AI agents are actors that take actions autonomously. Every assumption breaks.
- Your AI Risk Tier Is Probably Wrong
List-based and process-based approaches to AI risk classification both fail in predictable ways. The failure mode depends on which you chose.
- Human Oversight Doesn't Scale
Every AI governance framework demands human-in-the-loop. Nobody does the maths on what that means at enterprise scale.
- The Maker-Checker Trap
Most AI maker-checker implementations capture the correction but not the reason. That's a feedback loop with no signal.
- The Global Minimum of Governance
Governance isn't about catching every failure — it's about proving your process was reasonable when one happens. The real skill is knowing what to deliberately not monitor.
- 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.
- Agentic Search Ate RAG
When AI agents can grep, read, and reason iteratively, most RAG infrastructure becomes unnecessary middleware.
- 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.
- What LLMs Don't Volunteer
When you mine knowledge from an LLM, certain types come easily. Others are systematically absent. A taxonomy reveals the blind spots.
- When to Think and When to Count
Machine learning says let the model find the signal. Heuristics research says use one variable and ignore the rest. They're both right — the dividing line is how much data you have.
- The Heuristic Library
Experts don't make more decisions — they make fewer, by having better defaults. The real meta-skill is accumulating simple rules and knowing when to stop reasoning.
- Delegation Is Delegation
Whether you're trusting a doctor's prescription, an AI agent's code, or a junior engineer's pull request — the trust heuristics are identical.
- Why AI Demands Experiments
Most technology decisions can be reasoned through. AI solution design can't — the domain is too empirical, too fast-moving, and too non-linear for theory alone.