Archive
AI controls, agent systems, banking governance, production practice. 412 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.
- Read the Chain, Not the Date
Grand AI forecasts become useful when you stop accepting or rejecting the story as a whole and test the links that make its conclusion possible.
- The knowledge base is the maintenance
A working thesis, six months after my LLM wiki piece: plain Markdown plus relentless truth-keeping beats sophisticated storage plus neglect.
- The Judgement Bucket: How to Be Rigorous About the Claims You Can't Measure
The sequel to the calibration gap: some governance claims have no number, and that does not excuse them from evidence. Pre-register the rule, invite the refutation, name the residual, report honestly.
- The Calibration Gap: Why AI Assurance Needs Experimental Rigour at Consulting Speed
AI governance keeps choosing between rigorous-but-slow validation and fast-but-unfalsifiable frameworks. The escape is the experiment itself: for any measurable claim, the measurement is the faster path.
- The AI Portability Test
The real test of enterprise AI ownership is whether the organisation can change models without losing the learning accumulated around them.
- Near-Parity Is Mostly a Claim About Formatting
On the benchmark built to measure AI against real professional work, the best model scores 48% on deliverables that come in a file and 14% on deliverables judged as prose alone. That 34-point gap is the largest single effect in the paper, and it is not in the limitations section.
- The Number Checks Out. The Claim Doesn't.
The most-quoted figure about AI and professional work is accurate, in the paper, and correctly transcribed. It is also a description of a scenario nobody would choose, because what travelled was the number without the condition it was computed under.
- Your Reviewer Model Is Not Independent
When agents generate faster than anyone can read, the standard answer is a second model reviewing the first. Aerospace decomposed what makes a check independent decades ago, and a reviewer model fails the hardest of the three tests.
- Your Check Passed on the Proxy
A green result is a true statement about a stand-in. Whether that stand-in resembles the thing you care about is a separate question, and the check cannot answer it.
- What A Prompt Trim Cannot See
Deleting your agent's accumulated instructions is safest for the people who never tested them, and most dangerous for the people who did.
- Where the Harness Starts to Matter
In April my benchmark said coding correctness is model-determined and the harness is a thin proxy. Two newer results show exactly where that claim breaks: the harness matters at the edge of what the model can do.
- Retrieval Becomes a Control
Cerebras published an unusually honest account of their internal knowledge base. The retrieval engineering is solved. The assurance layer gets one sentence. Every enterprise copying this pattern is importing that asymmetry.
- The Work Behind the Work
Coordination cost reveals valuable AI workflows, but only cash conversion and competitive durability make them valuable businesses.
- The best idea I didn't adopt
Good and redundant are not opposites — they're the most common combination.
- The Program Is the Plan
For many agent workflows, the right abstraction is not another tool call. It is a bounded program over small primitives.
- A Skill Is Not a Prompt
The useful unit in agent systems is not a better instruction. It is a tested capability package: judgment, code, checks, routing, and boundaries.
- The Model Is Not the Unit of Return
Model revenue is not customer return. The economic and risk unit is the harness that turns model output into accountable work.
- After the Harness
Once model companies supply the generic agent harness, the valuable work moves into workflow design, human intervention, domain data, and the definition of good work.
- The SOP Is the Product
Enterprise AI stops being a chatbot when the operating procedure becomes the thing the system can execute, inspect, and improve.
- The Agent Is the Trace
Long-running agents are not defined by the model call. They are defined by the state, rules, tools, failures, and corrections that survive it.
- The frontier is no longer the back office
Ken Griffin watched PhD-level finance work compress from months to days. The interesting question is whether bank AI controls are designed for the layer where the work now lives.
- Agent-Native Onboarding Is Not a Signup Form
If a product wants agents as real users, first-run setup has to be an executable workflow, not a human signup ceremony wrapped in documentation.
- When Code Gets Cheap, Coordination Gets Expensive
Coding agents move the bottleneck from implementation to shared intent.
- After Automation, Judgment Becomes Infrastructure
When execution gets cheap, the scarce work moves to framing, review, and the systems that preserve judgment.
- What a port forgets
Porting a tool's API ports its constraints. Design from the target environment's ideal, then reconcile against the source's primitives.
- What the receipts cost
On the arithmetic and the binary in Susan Zhang's case for technologist careers.
- Recovery Is Not Control
Fast repair is useful, but it does not prove that a system remains understandable.
- The Label Is Not the Risk
AI governance needs domain knowledge where technical behaviour changes route, evidence, controls, and monitoring.
- The Agent Is Not the Control Point
Finance agents are evidence custody systems before they are model systems.
- A Persona Is Not a Control
Assigning roles to AI agents can look like governance. It only becomes useful when the role has a loss function, an evidence boundary, and an output contract.