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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. Exoskeleton, Not Colleague

    The AI governance conversation is stuck in the wrong frame. The pattern that works isn't autonomous agents — it's exoskeletons. Micro-agents handling narrow tasks, with human judgment at every point that matters.

  2. The One-Cycle-Late Test

    A simple heuristic for deciding how often to review anything: pick the longest interval where being late by one full cycle is still fine.

  3. Your AI Did the Research. You Didn't.

    AI-prepared domain research creates false readiness. The vault says you know five regulatory jurisdictions. You can't name three.

  4. The TODO Intake Gate

    Most TODO systems fail from too many items, not too few. A four-test intake filter for what deserves your attention.

  5. Match the Tool to the Shape

    Not every goal is a flywheel. The most common mistake in personal systems is treating a checklist as something that compounds.

  6. Mining Management Theory for AI Agent Teams

    What Grove, Drucker, Deming, and Weinberg knew about managing humans turns out to apply — with surprising specificity — to orchestrating AI agent teams.

  7. Taste Is the Bottleneck

    When you can run 60 agents overnight, knowing what to build matters more than building it.

  8. Meta-Skills Are the Multiplier

    We cut from 181 skills to 35 and added a 15-row routing table. Behavior improved across the board. The lesson: meta-skills compound, tool wrappers just add.

  9. Optimize for Routing, Not Tokens

    With 1M context windows, token savings are rounding error. The real metric is P(right tool | user intent) — does your agent reach for the right tool at the right moment?

  10. The Reliability Hierarchy: Hooks, Rules, Skills

    In AI agent systems, use the most reliable trigger mechanism that fits — most builders default to skills for everything, which is using the weakest mechanism as the default.

  11. Skills as Prototype, MCP as Production

    Skills and MCP servers aren't competitors. They're different stages of the same lifecycle. Build the procedure as a skill first. Graduate the tool parts to MCP when they stabilize.

  12. The Three Paradigms of Agent Knowledge

    Agent knowledge systems have three fundamental paradigms: static context, dynamic tools, and retrieval. Most stop at two. The third is the biggest unexploited opportunity.

  13. Match Form to Access Pattern

    The governing principle for structuring knowledge in AI agent systems isn't 'always atomic' — it's matching how knowledge is stored to how it's accessed.

  14. Legibility Is the Bottleneck

    An insight in your head is illegible — only you can access it, and only while you remember it. Compound interest requires a ledger.

  15. Skills Are Collapsed Recursion

    Humans handle about three layers of abstraction before working memory fills up. Skills, rules, and frameworks exist to flatten the fourth layer into something you can hold.

  16. Supply-Driven Compute

    Most people use AI tokens when they have a task. The better model: you have tokens, find the best task. It changes everything.

  17. What We Know About Multi-Agent Orchestration (And Why It Might Not Matter)

    The research on multi-agent AI systems was mostly done on cheap models. Now that frontier models are the ones people actually use, we might be optimising for the wrong game.

  18. Your Wearable Doesn't Know You're Tired

    Oura gave me a normal stress score after three 12-hour creative marathons. Wearables measure your body, not your brain.

  19. Inline Beats Reference for LLM Attention

    When building AI scaffolding, put the knowledge where the decision happens — not in a reference the model is supposed to consult.

  20. The Silence of Missing Skills

    The most dangerous failures in AI scaffolding are the ones that look like nothing happened.

  21. Play Within the Design

    Every AI coding platform has mechanisms designed for specific purposes. Using them as intended beats clever hacks — and the reason is deeper than cleanliness.

  22. Inference Cost Collapse Is a Governance Liability

    When AI agent calls approach zero cost, the natural rate-limiter on decision volume disappears — and oversight frameworks designed for prediction models break.

  23. The AI/DLT Conflation Trap in HKMA's March 2026 Strategic Review Mandate

    HKMA's new strategic review circular bundles AI inference risk and smart contract risk into one workstream — a governance design flaw that will cause banks to under-govern both.

  24. The Locksmith's Box

    I asked an AI to write a story without planning, then mined it for heuristics. What I found was what frameworks can't hold.

  25. Śūnyatā in the Skill Library

    A categorisation system discovers it needs a category for 'categories are provisional.'

  26. Stealing from Peers: A Truth-Seeking Discipline

    Most people scan competitors for positioning. I scan them for transferable patterns — and route each steal to every domain it applies to.

  27. When a Heuristic Has Two Homes

    Dual-mapping as a diagnostic for gaps in your knowledge architecture.

  28. The Specimen, Not the Container

    Why studying great thinkers works better when you discard the thinker and keep only the moves.

  29. The Immune System of AI Autonomy

    When your AI can see its own fuel gauge, you're one config write away from self-preservation instinct. Biology solved this problem — and the solution was keeping the organism away from its own selection pressure.

  30. The Lethal Trifecta: What OpenClaw's Security Crisis Teaches About AI Agent Architecture

    OpenClaw's 245 CVEs weren't caused by malice — they were caused by a missing circuit breaker. The pattern applies to every AI agent you'll ever evaluate.