AI & Emerging Technology
The AI Could Keep Fixing Things. We Had to Decide When to Stop.
A PDF investigation shows how sensible suggestions from an AI agent can add up to unplanned work—and why deciding what is enough takes human attention.
Purpose
Build & Improve
AI & Emerging Technology
The Context Between the Clicks
AI agents use interfaces designed for people who bring context and learn through experience. What happens when they arrive without either?
AI & Emerging Technology
What If We Can't Keep Up?
Chicago's Deep Tunnel offers lessons for investing in AI defense, finding bottlenecks, and adjusting when future demands exceed our plans.
AI & Emerging Technology
What Kind of Fires Does AI Start?
Alex Cannella applies familiar problem-solving methods to active AI incidents, smoldering problems, and conditions that could fuel future failures.
AI & Emerging Technology
Can an AI Stop Before It Guesses—and Keep Working?
A retrospective lab notebook tracing experiments, measurement mistakes, and imperfect results when an AI must pause an unsupported action while continuing useful research.
AI & Emerging Technology
Digital Pair Therapy
Use disagreement with a coding agent to uncover missing context, preserve decisions, and improve how you work together.
AI & Emerging Technology
Feelings, Evidence and Constraints in AI Collaboration
Separate feelings, evidence, constraints, and assumptions when working with AI, while keeping research findings and practical hypotheses distinct.
Systems Thinking
The Discovery That Never Happened
How unspoken questions and missing dissent can prevent ideas from meeting—and what organizations can do to protect discovery.
AI & Emerging Technology
When Your Chatbot Follows Your Lead
How unchecked assumptions, unspoken thoughts, and gaps in shared context can steer an AI conversation—and how to make room for correction.
AI & Emerging Technology
I Approved the Test Before I Learned What Else Would Change
A newsletter access-control test prompted questions about login authority, lasting changes, and what an approval warning does not explain.
AI & Emerging Technology
You Don’t Have to Answer Every Question Your AI Asks
A reasonable question from an AI agent can arrive before we know enough to answer it. Decide when to commit, when a provisional choice is enough, and when to keep learning.
AI & Emerging Technology
Beyond Automating Bottlenecks
Why the next big win is not just faster workflow, but better work selection
AI & Emerging Technology
Integrating GenAI Into User Workflow
Navigating the hype while meeting the future head on.
Strategy & Innovation
When Innovation Outruns Useful Life
How rapid replacement separates useful life from market value, and what that means for buying, building, and switching technology.
AI & Emerging Technology
A Better Way to Work: Give Your AI a Ticket
After roughly a thousand issues, tickets appear to help humans and AI coding agents preserve constraints, failed approaches, and prior decisions. Shared memory also needs human care to stay useful.
AI & Emerging Technology
Ask Your AI About the Tech Debt
A review of duplicated deployment work cut our deployment time by about a third. Periodic technical-debt reviews can reveal costs that have become routine, with humans deciding what to change.
AI & Emerging Technology
“The AI Did It” Is Not an Excuse
AI can move the work, but people and organizations remain accountable for the choices, safeguards, and outcomes of its use.
AI & Emerging Technology
Before the Fire: How We Learn to Use AI Safely
Responsible AI use is a learning loop: anticipate what could go wrong, observe what happens, and use what you learn to improve the next decision.
AI & Emerging Technology
Can You Recover Your AI Work?
Backup copies are a starting point. Recovering AI work also means restoring the conversations, instructions, connections, and context that make a project usable.
Systems Thinking
A Recommendation Needs Somewhere to Go
Recommendations need a receiving owner, a reasoned decision, and a way for learning to shape what comes next—even when the answer is no.
AI & Emerging Technology
What Chatbot Tricks Can Teach Us About Working Together
Repeatable habits keep human judgment involved when working with GenAI: develop the substance, pause to review, then give it shape.
AI & Emerging Technology
Why Aren’t Skills Namespaced?
Understand how flat skill names create ambiguity, and reduce friction and risk through source tracking, reviewed revisions, and deliberate updates.
AI & Emerging Technology
How Far Should an AI Claim Be Allowed to Travel?
Identify the last responsible gate where an unverified AI claim must be checked before action becomes hard to reverse.
AI & Emerging Technology
Human-Shaped, Not Human
Human-shaped model behavior raises choices about usefulness, safety, and the friction people face when those patterns are suppressed.
Trust, Risk & Governance
The Backup Illusion: Are We Actually Recoverable?
How independent recovery paths, retention, and tested restores help a business recover from mistakes, outages, and data loss.
AI & Emerging Technology
When Building Gets Faster Than Learning
Faster implementation changes when we can validate a system against the business it serves, and how we should plan to stay involved.
AI & Emerging Technology
Behavior Patterns for Creating with GenAI
Shared Conceptual Vocabulary for Working with AI
AI & Emerging Technology
AI Is Only Magic When We Close Our Eyes
When AI systems behave in unexpected ways, senior leaders need to examine the objectives, tools, permissions, monitoring, and organizational capacity surrounding the model.
AI & Emerging Technology
Why Giving AI More Context Works
Relevant context helps define an AI task through useful constraints, which makes a fitting answer more likely.
AI & Emerging Technology
Second Brains, Post Offices, and the Problem of Finding Things
A plain-language explanation of why AI-powered second brains depend on maps, indexes, and human validation to find the right information.
AI & Emerging Technology
Where Second Brains Break
A practical article on stress-testing AI-powered second brains for retrieval, source authority, calibration, and safe operating boundaries.
AI & Emerging Technology
The Technical Debt That Confuses GenAI
GenAI can expose the kind of technical debt where business meaning and implementation paths have drifted apart.
AI & Emerging Technology
How to Measure Collaboration Friction in AI-Assisted Work
A practical how-to article on using transcript-based collaboration friction as one measurement tool for improving agentic work environments.
AI & Emerging Technology
Shared Principles for Human and AI Collaborators
A field note on using shared operating principles to make human-AI collaboration more trustworthy.
AI & Emerging Technology
The Coverage We Forgot
AI-accelerated delivery needs a broader definition of coverage before teams can release with confidence.
AI & Emerging Technology
The Interesting Part Is Not the Idea, It Is the Translation Layer
AI collaboration gets interesting when old patterns are carried into a new working context.
AI & Emerging Technology
Asking for a Query vs. Asking for Help Designing a Query
Before asking for the implementation, collaborate on the design.
AI & Emerging Technology
The System Found the Word…
How Semantic Debt Compounds at Machine Speed
Data & Software
Counting the Not-Directly-Countable in SQL
A Practical Pattern for Trustworthy Distinct Counts, Subtotals, and Grand Totals
AI & Emerging Technology
Reagan Was Right - Trust, But Verify
A lesson from an AI agent that did not actually turn off.
AI & Emerging Technology
Building a Better Human-Bot Collaboration Environment in Obsidian
What it took to turn scattered notes, an AI agent, and a shifting workspace into a collaboration that actually got better over time.
AI & Emerging Technology
How LLMs Answer Questions They Were Never Taught
A useful answer is not proof that a chatbot knows, remembers, or has checked the answer.
AI & Emerging Technology
From Zero to Hero in Prompting
A practical guide to clearer AI prompts through specific instructions, useful structure, roles, and iterative refinement.
Data & Software
Data Mart Hygiene First Principles
You can catch contradictions without knowing the whole story.
Data & Software
Just Parse It Later
The Dirty Secret of Free Text Overloading