Ideas, observations,
and honest takes.
No hype. No tools-of-the-week. Observations from someone who uses AI in production work every day and cares whether the take is accurate.
The Signal Beats the Badge
Rewards for restrained AI use moved nothing. A UI signal that reflected each offload back at the user halved it and lifted unaided performance.
Your AI policy moves only the compliers
A randomized experiment at ICML 2026 measured what an AI-use policy actually does at scale. It moves a third and misses the rest.
The empathy work nobody is doing
A new USC and Vanderbilt study puts numbers on what the L1 human in your dispute chair is not doing: cooling affect, offering trade-offs.
A person in the seat
A preregistered paper on AI hiring says applicants weight one thing above every safeguard: a person in the seat. Worth twenty accuracy points.
Your workforce cannot name its AI use
Only 23% of people could name the way they most use AI. Their leaders are running the wrong survey.
Change the Artefact, Not the Reviewer
The summary an agent writes about itself refers to one action in eleven, and its completeness does not predict correction.
Benchmarks Pick the Wrong Partner
Two AI partners can hand humans the same literal signal and produce 14.4% or 34.4% human failure. Vendor benchmarks are blind to this.
The interactivity you paid for
Adding a chat surface to an AI advisor did not shift behaviour, and almost nobody used it. The interactivity is a demo asset.
The Safety Net Nobody Writes
Every AI transformation plan I read assumes the state will absorb the humans it moves. Across 33 parliaments, that story is not being written.
The AI score is a lever
The position of the AI signal on your review screen roughly doubles the weight it carries in the next human decision.
What your copilot quietly displaces
Your productivity dashboard measures what the copilot does. Nobody is measuring what it quietly replaces.
Your Escalation Queue Trains Your Reviewers
The composition of your escalation queue silently reshapes reviewer accuracy, and reviewers cannot feel it happening.
The wrong dose of AI in the room
A small AI presence sharpens group decisions. A third breaks them. A majority-AI room agrees on ideas nobody would have written.
The Audit Mirror You Already Own
Run an AI baseline in the shadow of your senior people and you have built an instrument that measures their drift.
The AI Disclaimer Is a Comfort Blanket
A compliance disclosure feels like risk management. In the field the AI still moves the user.
The Better You Are at AI, the Less You Catch Its Mistakes
A study of 1,339 teachers found the most tech-fluent reviewers deferred to wrong AI the most. Fluency is quietly becoming a liability.
Stop Asking If AI Will Replace Your People
Every executive is running the wrong threat assessment. The question isn't whether AI will take jobs. It's whether AI will make your people's expertise worth more or worth less.
The Skill Your Best People Are Losing
Everyone is measuring whether AI made your team faster. The question that matters is whether it is quietly making them worse at the thing they handed over.
The cheapest output AI gives your team is confidence
The heaviest AI users on your team feel like the experts. A new UC Irvine study says they are the ones learning least.
Who's Actually In Your AI Data
Every confident statistic about how AI is reshaping work is partly a statistic about who shows up in the conversation logs.
What if Anthropic chose Albania as a research hub?
ChatGPT to Malta is a press release. Anthropic to Albania would be a thesis — the first country on earth where you could watch an AI-native generation become itself in real time.
Stop asking Claude if your plan works. Ask how it failed.
The prompt Anthropic product teams reportedly run before shipping flips Claude from defending your plan to populating its failure.
The AI you audit is not the AI they ship
When humans watch a language model, it shifts register. Your governance committee meets one version. Your team meets another.
Your team's thinking time collapsed. The output looks identical.
A new USC study: with an LLM, programmers had the same ideas in their solutions. They just stopped thinking before they wrote.
When AI Fails Politely, Humans Fail Quietly
Field-tested at Alibaba: when agentic AI hands off a frustrated customer, the human worker quietly disengages instead of stepping up.
Your AI rollout has a system problem, not a skill problem
Microsoft surveyed 20,000 knowledge workers. Two thirds of AI's impact comes from the system around the worker, not the worker. Most rollouts forget this.
AI writes the goal. You won't do it.
AI writes objectively cleaner goals than the people who use it. Those same people then quietly stop acting on them.
The humans got harder to talk to
Three weeks with a sycophantic chatbot, and people are as likely to ask the model for personal advice as their closest friends — and less satisfied with the humans in their lives.
AI is not a colleague
Putting an AI on the org chart does not improve adoption. It quietly slides accountability off the human who built the work.
The human-in-the-loop fiction
Putting a human in the loop isn't a safeguard. It's a stage on which the AI performs.
Stop performing AI literacy
The signal that someone is actually fluent isn't their vocabulary. It's their patience.
The five prompts I use every morning
A practitioner's real workflow — not the one on LinkedIn.
Why I stopped caring about model benchmarks
Benchmarks measure the model. I care about what happens after the prompt.
What "good at prompting" actually means
It's not a technical skill. It's a communication skill. The distinction matters more than you'd think.
The gap is communication, not code
The actual barrier to AI fluency isn't access. It's articulation.
Ideas, observations,
and honest takes.
No hype. No tools-of-the-week. Just the work, explained clearly, from someone who uses this every day and cares whether it is accurate.
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