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Topic

ai

187 essays on this topic.

  1. The Confidence Stack

    Not all knowledge is equally trustworthy. Three tiers of validation — from 'a model said it' to 'it survived reality' — and why tracking the difference matters.

  2. How to Think With AI (Not Just Use It)

    Most people use AI like a tool. Here's what thinking with AI actually looks like — and the skills that make the difference.

  3. Your AI Is a Thinking Partner, Not a Q&A Bot

    Stop asking your AI single questions. Start thinking out loud with it. Let half-formed ideas land. The AI holds the structure so you can stay in flow.

  4. Guardrails Are Rivers, Not Walls

    The best guardrails work like river banks — they don't stop the water, they focus it. Constraints create capability.

  5. Your AI Is an Echo Chamber (And That's Sometimes Fine)

    AI agrees with you by design. That's great for creative flow and dangerous at the decision point. Know when to switch modes.

  6. Enterprise AI Agents: The Transformation Is Organisational, Not Technical

    The companies that win with AI agents aren't deploying the most agents — they're redesigning their organisations to work with them.

  7. Mining Your LLM

    Your AI already knows things that would make it better at helping you. The trick is extracting that knowledge and making it permanent.

  8. When LangGraph Earns Its Keep

    LangGraph is the SAP of agent orchestration — powerful at scale, overkill for most. Here's the line.

  9. Your AI Pipeline Is Probably MapReduce

    Most AI workflows are parallel-then-aggregate, not agent graphs. Knowing the difference saves you from framework theatre.

  10. The Expert Illusion

    Why 'you are an expert' is the most popular and least useful prompt engineering technique

  11. What If Your Vault Had Residents?

    Not tools that search your notes — personalities that live in them, form opinions, and disagree with each other.

  12. The MTEB Leader Barely Beats a Free Model on Agent Memory

    I benchmarked 10 memory backends and multiple embedding models on actual agent memory retrieval. The results challenge common assumptions about what matters.

  13. Your Agent Pays the Cold-Start Tax Every Morning

    Agent memory isn't knowledge management. It's performance infrastructure — and the gap between a stateless agent and one that accumulates context is measurable.

  14. The Knowledge That Disappears When You Try to Capture It

    Enterprise AI keeps promising to capture institutional knowledge. The most valuable kind resists capture by design.

  15. What AlphaSense Charges Ten Thousand Dollars For

    I built an AI landscape intelligence pipeline for zero marginal cost. Here's what it does and what it can't.

  16. The Eval Gap

    The scarce AI skill isn't building — it's knowing if what you built actually works.

  17. Don't Be Impressed by Fluency

    AI can reproduce smart arguments on demand. I'm not sure that's different from thinking. But the uncertainty itself is worth sitting with.

  18. Philosophy Isn't the Opposite of Practical

    The people who examine the system they're inside tend to make better decisions within it.

  19. What Is Understanding?

    I use AI every day. I genuinely can't tell if it understands anything. That question is harder than it looks.

  20. Where Gen AI Is Actually Transformative (And Where It Isn't)

    I work in AI in financial services. The honest list of where gen AI is real is shorter than the industry wants you to think.

  21. You Can't A/B Test Your Life

    My career looks like a plan in retrospect. It wasn't. It was a series of pushes, wrong calls, and adjustments.

  22. Your Wage Reflects Your Scarcity, Not Your Worth

    The most successful piece of propaganda in modern economics is the idea that what you earn is what you deserve.

  23. The Assistant Is a Character

    People confuse the LLM with the helpful AI assistant. They're not the same thing. The LLM is a prediction engine. The assistant is a role it's playing. The distinction changes how you use it.

  24. The Black Box That Responds to Role Play

    An LLM can't feel accountability pressure. But structured role-play — simulated rejection, persona assignment, adversarial review — produces measurably better output. The mechanism is opaque; the effect is real.

  25. The 'Are You Sure?' Loop

    AI's first 'I'm done' is almost never its best work. Simulated accountability pressure — just asking 'are you sure?' — surfaces blind spots that self-review misses.

  26. Redundancy Is the Only Honest AI Research Strategy

    I ran the same question through 6 AI tools and scored them against peer-reviewed evidence. Every tool got something wrong that another got right.

  27. The Calculator Analogy

    Nobody practises arithmetic speed anymore. The same thing is happening to prose, research, and analysis — and it changes what humans should get good at.

  28. The Thirty-Year Gap Between Faking and Understanding Natural Language

    From AppleScript's rigid English-like syntax to LLM tool-calling — what changes when the computer actually understands you.

  29. Not Every Cron Job Is a Feedback Loop

    Automation that collects without learning is just a cron job. The difference is a feedback signal — a number that goes up or down.

  30. The Loop Is the Product

    Karpathy's autoresearch and every useful AI tool share the same pattern: the code is trivial, the feedback loop is the product.