Thinking in AI
“This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it. They will appear wise, but not be so.” — Thamus to the god Theuth, on the invention of writing, in Plato’s Phaedrus Sometime in the …
The Habit of Emergence
The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts. –Aristotle Many years ago, during a particularly wayward period of my misspent youth (i.e.: my cowboy period), having pulled a calf from …
The No-Regret Portfolio
You cannot win a bet on a future impossible to predict. You can only become a human who survives regardless of outcome. Three AI fears walk into a bar. The first tries to order everything on the menu at once …
What Will Endure in Agentic AI
The most durable advances in Agentic AI are not what the demos suggest.They are what the plumbing demands. Convening the Ministry Thirteen years ago I came back to hands-on software engineering and data science after a long stretch in management …
AI: The Only Benchmark that Matters
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” — William Bruce Cameron (often misattributed to Einstein) Thirteen years ago, when I began my journey back into hands-on coding after years of management consulting, …
Liquid Software
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus I have been thinking a lot recently about permanence. In our industry, we have spent the better …
The Convergence at the Edge of Understanding: When AI Starts Seeing the Ghost in the Matter
There’s a moment in every scientific revolution when the instruments start agreeing with each other too perfectly; when the thermometers, barometers, and galvanometers begin telling the same story not because they’ve been calibrated together, but because they’ve all stumbled upon …
Collaborative Intelligence: Agentic Teamwork
There is a moment in every great jazz improvisation where the individual musicians stop playing at each other and begin playing through each other. Coltrane called it “sheets of sound.” Miles simply called it listening. I’ve been thinking about this …
The Agentic Pattern: Software That Negotiates Its Own Reality
Thank you nano-bannana
The most profound shift in computing isn’t that our tools got faster. It’s that they started saying “I disagree.” We built the first agents as polite function-wrappers—Lisp macros that could choose between search strategies, expert systems that weighed confidence scores. …
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Situational Blind-Spots
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” — Niels Bohr (maybe) Recently I’ve started binging “Foundation” on AppleTV, enjoying it with as much ardor as when I first read Asimov’s trilogy as a child. If you are not familiar …