ai

Why the structure of an output matters more than the instructions that produce it.

A coding assistant quietly made three productivity apps redundant. Not by replacing them — by making context collapse the boundaries between them.

The resistance to AI agents in banking isn't mostly cultural. It's infrastructure — and the gap is more interesting than the politics.

On why the blank page stopped being the hard part.

I kept missing things at the end of AI sessions. So I stopped relying on willpower and systematised the nudge instead.

Most teams build evaluators before reading a single trace. The sequence that actually works is the opposite: observe, categorise, then measure.

A model control that's never fired in production isn't a control — it's a hypothesis. The gap between backtest and operational validation is invisible until someone asks.

The standard AI economic models assume wage effects and retraining timelines. They don't model the feedback loop where successful AI deployment reduces the customer base that purchases AI-enabled products.

The cognitive offloading problem is real. The governance response mostly isn't. There's a specific mechanism at work, and it has a specific fix.

Aeronautics flew for decades before anyone could explain why wings worked. AI is in the same position. The engineering is ahead of the theory.

The failure mode of AI advice isn't hallucination. It's that it agrees with you. Here's the architecture that fixes it.

Most consultants arrive at a new firm and learn their tools from colleagues. I tried something different.

I published three Rust CLI tools to crates.io before noon — none existed at breakfast. The interesting part isn't the speed. It's that the bottleneck moved.

AI can simulate aesthetic judgment with impressive fluency. What it cannot simulate is the consequence of being wrong.

Most AI tooling debates are actually recurrence debates. The question isn't whether to build — it's how many times you'll need it.

Sequoia says AGI is here. Dan Shipper says we're not there yet. They're both right — they're measuring different things. The question that actually matters is Sholto Douglas's "nines of reliability."

The models aren't the problem. The operating models are. Three structural failures in AML AI from years building these systems inside a bank.

Two job ads. Same bank. Same week. Same title pattern. Completely different jobs. The AI hiring market has a labelling problem.

When AI models commoditize, the moat isn't the model. It's the infrastructure AI must flow through but can't replace. Five archetypes of what that looks like.

We're optimising for the wrong number — and the history of consumer electronics suggests we'll figure this out eventually.

Mox didn't win because they hired better designers. They won because they had no legacy to fight. The pattern applies directly to AI transformation.

Ask for bugs and you'll get bugs — whether they exist or not. Sycophancy is a design feature, and the fix isn't better prompting.

The most dangerous person in an AI consulting engagement knows how the model works but has never sat in a credit committee.

Banks are deploying RAG for compliance and discovering the hard problem isn't retrieval. It's the pipeline before it.

The operational instincts built in production banking don't belong in the past. They're exactly what makes a practitioner-turned-consultant useful.

The real project isn't artificial intelligence. It's the data infrastructure that AI exposes as broken.

We're building parallel interfaces for the same functionality because humans and AI agents parse the world through fundamentally different grammars. The future isn't human OR machine interfaces - it's both, simultaneously.

When AI can execute complex setups through conversation, learning shifts from reading documentation to observing execution.

When AI coding assistants become workflow orchestrators, the most powerful compiler processes reality, not code.

Walking meetings, voice input, and location changes unlock cognitive advantages desktop workflows can't access.