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AI controls, agent systems, banking governance, production practice. 412 essays, newest first.

  1. 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.

  2. Governing Agents the Way Cells Govern Themselves

    Six cell biology mechanisms that reveal what the networking 'control plane' metaphor misses about governing AI agents.

  3. 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.

2026
  1. Progressive Trust: How to Give AI Agents Autonomy Without Gambling

    The debate about AI agent autonomy is wrong. It's not a binary choice — it's a graduated trust system with observability.

  2. 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.

  3. Philosophy Isn't the Opposite of Practical

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

  4. The Market Prices Leverage, Not Value

    After a decade in financial services, I've stopped believing that what you earn reflects what you contribute.

  5. What Is Understanding?

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

  6. 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.

  7. You Can Know the Game Is Unfair and Still Play It

    Supporting a family in a system you see clearly isn't selling out. It's the most honest position there is.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. What Feels Like Play

    Naval's famous line is easy to nod at. The hard part is actually identifying yours — and being honest about what isn't.

  16. Your Body Doesn't Care What You're Thinking About

    30 days of Oura data showed activity type doesn't predict stress. Meetings do.

  17. 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.

  18. 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.

  19. 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.

  20. The Bootstrap Problem in AI Tooling

    You need the tool to build the tool. The answer is: build the dumb version first, use it once, then have it build its replacement.

  21. Why Nobody Builds Cross-Vendor AI Orchestration

    Every AI lab builds single-vendor orchestration. The cross-vendor layer is a gap — and it's a gap for a reason.

  22. The Orchestration Layer Is Knowledge, Not Code

    Multi-agent AI orchestration frameworks are commodity. The competitive advantage is knowing which agent to use when, what breaks, and how to recover.

  23. Is Insight an Illusion

    When pattern-matching feels like wisdom, what are we actually experiencing?

  24. The Grey Areas Are the Whole Thing

    Ethics isn't about knowing the answer — it's about feeling the tension

  25. Why Be Nice

    The question I can't fully answer for my son

  26. The Fluency Trap

    When AI conversations feel insightful because the language model is good at producing insight-shaped text

  27. Why Nobody Benchmarks Memory

    The things that matter most in production are the things that get benchmarked least

  28. The Byproduct Trap

    When the paper becomes more interesting than the answer you set out to find

  29. AI Agents Need Notebooks, Not Just Memories

    The missing layer in enterprise AI isn't smarter models — it's structured memory that humans can actually review.

  30. Guardrails Beat Guidance

    Prompt instructions are suggestions. Hooks are constraints. One survives a model swap.