AI Engineering

Thoughts on how to thrive in the age of vibe coding, using AI agents, how to engineer with and for AI.

The logic of saying "no"

What Anthropic's Pentagon standoff reveals about trust in AI is that refusal can be a strategy in the age of AI.

March 06, 2026

Beyond the encoding gap: Metafeatures, Swarms, and the Architecture of Discovery

On artificial discovery and its human costs

February 08, 2026

Beyond the encoding gap: Metafeatures, Swarms, and the Architecture of Discovery

On Artificial Discovery and Its Human Cost

February 08, 2026

The Residue and the Trace: What AI Cannot Extract from Expert Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge, Training Corpus Boundaries, and the Knowledge AI Cannot Reach

February 08, 2026

Why AI can make organisations slower before it makes them faster

AI dramatically accelerates cognitive production while leaving coordination, judgment, and context-building at human speed. The result is not acceleration but fragmentation. Bottlenecks migrate to integration points we have not designed for. The path forward requires building epistemic scaffolding, deliberate backpressure, and systems that treat human judgment as the scarce resource it has/will become.

February 04, 2026

The Archaeological Reversal

When AI sees structure better than you, what can we humans do?

February 03, 2026

The Composition Problem

The spec-verify loop works for parts, but the theory of how parts relate lives in no single specification. Composition requires its own genesis, its own traversal, at the level of interaction between stable components.

February 02, 2026

The Encoding Gap

Why working code is not the same as understanding. What is the human role in the age of coding agents? and Why it is not as straight-forward as 'just use coding agents' and it will all be fine.

February 01, 2026

Augmenting Human Intellect in the Age of Agentic AI: Revisiting Engelbart Concepts from 1960s

What Changes When Our Tools Become Agents

January 31, 2026

Creating reliable Systems from unreliable parts: Thirty Years of Designing Around Uncertainty

Why perfecting AI components is the wrong goal; Orchestration over perfection.

January 31, 2026

The world is full of isomorphisms

Starting to feel a sense of deja-vu scrolling through new all the news about AI? Does it all seem to be the same stuff over and over about AI across LinkedIn, X, Discord, Reddit?

January 28, 2026

Bounds, not goals: Designing AI Agents that do not drift.

Lessons from biology for human-AI systems

January 26, 2026

Can AI Agents replace experts?

We have a century of research that says that "context cannot bootstrap understanding"

January 25, 2026

What the ancients knew about agency.

Freedom in a world accelerated by AI

January 24, 2026

AI changed what's possible. Knowing whats' worth doing did not get easier

There is history that does not live in artifacts

January 23, 2026

The Ladder Is Gone: High Agency, AI, and the Ancient Wisdom We'll Need to Survive It

Agency, AI, and the Collapse of the Career Ladder

January 22, 2026

The Protocol Prison: How GUIs Became Technical Debt for Intelligence

Open Microsoft Word. Ask Copilot to help you write. Notice where it lives? ... a sidebar. A chat widget bolted onto the edge of an interface designed in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the ribbon toolbar with its nested menus and modal dialogs sits unchanged, untouched by the intelligence supposedly transforming knowledge work.

January 22, 2026

The Hollow-Middle: Values Flees the Friction-Free Zone

With AI value evaporates from execution & condenses towards Physical Reality/Constraint and the teleology (judgment/intent).

January 21, 2026

Reasoning Gap: Why Hybrid AI Systems are working so well

A Technical Analysis for AI/ML Practitioners

January 20, 2026

From For-Loops to Colonies: The Architecture of Scaled AI Coding

Why current AI coding tools, even the hottest ones like Ralph Loops and massive agent swarms will soon hit a wall. And a biological pattern that could take us beyond human-scale software engineering.

January 17, 2026

Feedback Is Substrate

Scale-Free Principles for AI Engineering

January 15, 2026

Human Purpose vs AI Capability

A strategic briefing note

January 11, 2026

The Catalyst Effect: How AI Tools Reshape the Economics of Getting Started

Implications for Pedagogy, Skill Development, and Workforce Training in the Age of Agentic AI

January 02, 2026

Trust as Cognitive Multiplier: The Hidden Architecture of Human-AI Collaboration

Reliability is necessary but insufficient; what matters is the alignment between actual system behaviour and the user's tacit model of that behaviour

December 25, 2025

Software Engineering in the age of AI: From Craft to Complex Systems

Reflections from the 15 April 2025 unconference about SE in the age of AI (Melbourne Australia)

April 14, 2025

AI Engineering