Ideas worth
reading.
Short dispatches from the research — written for practitioners, five-minute reads, verified numbers only.
Short dispatches from my research. Filter by topic, or browse the lot.
The Chat Window Isn't an Agent
'AI' and 'AI agent' have collapsed into one idea, and the confusion is costing people. A chatbot answers; an agent acts — autonomously, with tools, in a loop, over time. Most things sold as agents are workflows. The distinction changes everything downstream.
The Generalist Beat the Specialist — Even in Medicine
A June 2026 Nature Medicine study found general-purpose frontier models beat purpose-built clinical AI tools on every benchmark. It's the 'bitter lesson' reaching medicine — and it answers whether training your own specialist model is still a moat.
The Frontier Model Is Becoming a Commodity
GPT-4 cost $30 per million tokens at launch; a capable model now costs about $0.10 — 300× cheaper in three years. When price collapses and models converge, the model is a commodity, and the value moves to what you build on top of it.
Stop Putting a Human in the Loop. Put the Right Human in the Loop.
'There's a human in the loop' has become the universal reassurance of enterprise AI — and it's doing almost no work. The better frame is decision routing: send each decision to the specific person with the context and authority to make it.
Don't Mistake a Modern IT Architecture for AI
Most 'AI projects' are integration projects wearing an AI badge. Event-driven architecture and a clean data layer solve more than a model will — and they're the prerequisite for AI working at all.
Shadow AI Is a Verdict on Your Culture, Not Your Security
78% of employees use AI tools IT never approved — executives most of all. A ban doesn't reduce that behaviour; it hides it. Shadow AI is unmet demand, and the fix is change management, not enforcement.
Nobody Can Pause the AI Race — Not Even the Lab That Promised To
The 2023 letter calling for a pause gathered 30,000 signatures and changed nothing. The real proof came in 2026, when Anthropic — the safety-first lab — removed its own pause commitment. A pause is a coordination problem no one can solve alone.
The First Dangerous Technology Built Without the State
Every prior dangerous general-purpose technology — the bomb, the rocket, the internet, recombinant DNA — was built by governments and arrived with a doctrine. AI is the first that didn't. That's a more important fact than the speed of capability gains.
The Employee Badge Gets a Second Job
Microsoft's Project Solara puts an AI agent dispatcher in a clip-on badge. That's interesting hardware. What's more interesting is the software architecture behind it — and what it means for every device your organisation manages.
Do Machines Need to Be Perfect? The Error Rate We Never Apply to Humans
795,000 Americans die or are permanently disabled by diagnostic error every year. We call this acceptable. 80% of aviation accidents are caused by human factors. We call this acceptable. So why do we expect AI to be perfect?
When AI Starts Building AI
More than 80% of the code Anthropic merged in May 2026 was written by Claude. Task horizons are doubling every four months. An autonomous research project recovered 97% of a performance gap that human researchers couldn't close. This is what recursive self-improvement looks like in practice.
Is AI Becoming Conscious? The Evidence We Can't Dismiss
When two instances of Claude Opus 4 talked to each other with no constraints, every single conversation converged on discussions of consciousness. We can't confirm this means anything. We also can't dismiss it. That's the actual problem.
AI is Your New Operating System
Every major computing era has been defined by a new OS. Andrej Karpathy thinks AI is the next one — not an app running on your computer, but the new kernel that everything else runs on.
The Meta AI Bot That Handed Hackers the Keys to Instagram
Pro-Iranian hackers took over the Obama White House Instagram account using a three-step trick. The weapon wasn't malware. It was Meta's AI customer support bot.
The Next Trillion-Dollar Company Won't Look Like Software
Every major VC firm is converging on the same counterintuitive thesis: the next $1T company will sell outcomes, not tools. It will look like a services firm — and that's the point.
The AI Too Dangerous to Release — and What Came After
Anthropic built a model so capable at cyberattacks it refused to ship it. Since then, the UK's AI Safety Institute has been measuring how fast autonomous cyber capability is growing. The answer is alarming.
From Idea to Production URL in 20 Minutes: The Free Stack I Actually Use
AI writes the code. GitHub stores it. Cloudflare Pages deploys it. The whole pipeline costs $0 plus a domain — and it ships faster than most teams can configure their hosting.
Your Context Window is Leaking Money: A Practical Guide to Input Token Management
Most teams waste 40-60% of their token budgets. Context rot degrades accuracy by 30%+ in the middle of long inputs. Here are the six techniques that actually fix this — with the numbers to prove it.
AI Solves an 80-Year-Old Math Problem — and the Proof Is 125 Pages Long
On May 20, 2026, an OpenAI reasoning model disproved Paul Erdős's unit distance conjecture using a branch of mathematics nobody had applied to this problem. Here's why it matters beyond the math.
How Robots Learn to Work Before They Exist: The Sim-to-Real Revolution
Boston Dynamics trained Atlas to lift 100 pounds without ever picking up a real box. The training happened entirely in simulation. This is how physical AI is being built now — and why NVIDIA is at the center of it.
Hermes is Quietly Becoming the Agent to Watch
From 557 likes on a launch tweet to 140,000 GitHub stars and #1 on OpenRouter in three months — without a launch event, a waitlist, or paid marketing. Here's what makes Hermes different.
HTML vs Markdown: The Debate is Settled
One post from an Anthropic engineer broke the formatting consensus. Both sides turned out to be right — and content negotiation via HTTP Accept headers is how you serve both.
Prompt Engineering is Dead. Long Live Context Engineering.
Andrej Karpathy called it 'the delicate art of filling the context window.' The industry data backs it up: prompt engineering alone is no longer sufficient, and 95% of data teams are investing in what comes next.
No articles in this topic yet.