Writing
First-principles essays, shorter notes, and practical guides. Search directly or use one of the broad buckets.
Guides
Start with a path
Guides are structured chapter sets. Open one to see the full topic list, then read chapters individually.
The Non-Technical Leader's Guide to AI
A plain-English curriculum for executives who need enough AI fluency to make better decisions without becoming engineers.
View guide →How to build a team that wins in the AI age
A plain-English guide to building teams that use AI to improve real work, not just create more activity.
View guide →Recent writing
21 pieces- essayJune 18, 2026
The Excel adoption curve is the AI adoption curve
Excel is a better analogy for AI adoption than electricity or the printing press because we can still see how the adoption actually happened.
- noteJune 6, 2026
Resistance is data
When people resist AI tools, the useful question is not how to persuade them faster. It is what the resistance knows.
- noteMay 24, 2026
Feedback loops need a place to land
A system only improves when corrections become memory, skill changes, eval cases, or routing rules.
- noteMay 24, 2026
Memory promotion is the product
An agent memory system becomes useful when it knows which records are allowed to become context.
- noteMay 24, 2026
Raw intake is not memory
The first job of agent memory is to capture without pretending the capture is already true.
- noteMay 24, 2026
Retrieval is a judgment layer
Good retrieval is not just finding related notes. It is deciding what context is safe to use for the task.
- noteMay 24, 2026
Skills are bounded capabilities
A skill should be small enough that its inputs, allowed actions, and failure modes can be named.
- noteMay 24, 2026
Team memory needs permissions
A shared agent system needs to know who can read, write, approve, and act before it becomes useful.
- noteMay 9, 2026
Why I love synthetic data
It's the rare medium where breadth, creativity, and technical chops compound instead of trading off.
- noteMay 7, 2026
Taste is the rare skill now
Producing is cheap. Choosing is hard. The résumé that didn't get rewarded before is the one that does now.
- essayApril 28, 2026
The immersive room is a listening environment
We keep measuring whether immersive demos teach more. They don't. That's the wrong question.
- essayApril 21, 2026
The apprenticeship was a curriculum
Junior labor was the curriculum. AI eliminated the labor and didn't replace the curriculum.
- noteApril 16, 2026
Synthetic data quality is not a number
There's no general score, the absence is structural, and the test that matters is the one you run on your own use case.
- essayApril 14, 2026
The author is still the author
Use AI to draft, refine, brainstorm, code — fine. The moment your name is on it, every word is yours. 'GPT wrote it' does not transfer accountability. It just makes you a person who admits they didn't read what they sent.
- essayApril 7, 2026
Dataset vs data product
A dataset is a file. A data product is a contract about what questions it can answer, who owns the answers, and what happens when those answers change.
- essayMarch 31, 2026
Is the AI-to-AI email loop the world we want?
When my assistant writes to your assistant, what is the email actually for? Asymmetric drafting is one thing. Both sides automated is another, and the medium starts to lie about whose attention is being spent.
- noteMarch 26, 2026
Real AI strategies are about subtraction
If you can't name what you'll stop doing once the AI works, you don't have a strategy. You have a wishlist.
- essayMarch 24, 2026
What 20 correlations taught me about consumer health data
Twenty typed correlations, a sample-size gate per phase, and one confounder that broke half of them. The half that survived are the only ones I trust to surface to a user.
- essayMarch 17, 2026
I thought AI could write the app. My team humbled me.
Code generation has gotten very good. Naming the right abstraction has not. Most of what makes a system maintainable still happens before any code is written, and that part is not getting easier.
- essayMarch 10, 2026
Cycle as a confounder
Half the species moves through a four-phase hormonal cycle. Most consumer health correlations don't condition on which phase the data was collected in. Most of those correlations are wrong, or right for the wrong reason.
- essayMarch 3, 2026
Zero-to-low sample generation
A handful of real records, a regulator who won't release more, and a system that has to be tested anyway. Most synthetic data writing is for a different problem.