Stories, reflections, and field notes
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Nearly every established discipline has a canonical reference that already settled the argument you're having with a model. Name it, hand it over, and let the model regularize its own work against a standard instead of your improvised feedback.
Tell the model to close every response with a short list, split by who acts. It turns a wall of prose back into something you can actually run a project on.
Stop accepting reports. Ask for the artifact — the actual numbers, the actual error, the actual file — and the confident-sounding failure disappears.
Be the coach, not the player. On taking the seat that directs a team of AI agents — and the practice it takes to get good at it.
A finite brain masters only a few skills in a lifetime. Commanding a machine that learned everything is the new skill multiplier.
Now that you don't have to do the thing — what do you actually want to do? The closing post of the What's Left series.
A department of a hundred writers documented mainframe billing programs. Every one of them had something else they'd rather be doing. They knew.
My first employer ran Florida's telecom on millions of dollars of mainframes and VAX clusters. My phone outclasses all of it. We never stopped to notice.
A late friend had two sayings. The first one gets you started. The second one keeps you going. In the age of AI, the second one has gotten more useful, not less.
Exploring how Leonard Nimoy's garden wisdom transcends Thomas Sowell's "no solutions, only tradeoffs" to find meaning in an indifferent universe.
As frontier models exhaust clean data sources, learn why digital sewage treatment systems for enterprise data will become the most critical and valuable AI infrastructure.
A personal reflection on encountering computers for the first time in the 1970s and the lasting impact of those early moments of technological wonder.
After 40 years and dozens of programming languages, I haven't written a single line of code this year. Not because I've retired, but because I've learned my final language: English.