What Anthropic's Pentagon standoff reveals about trust in AI is that refusal can be a strategy in the age of AI.
On artificial discovery and its human costs
On Artificial Discovery and Its Human Cost
Tacit Knowledge, Training Corpus Boundaries, and the Knowledge AI Cannot Reach
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.
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.
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.
What Changes When Our Tools Become Agents
Why perfecting AI components is the wrong goal; Orchestration over perfection.
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?
We have a century of research that says that "context cannot bootstrap understanding"
There is history that does not live in artifacts
Agency, AI, and the Collapse of the Career Ladder
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.
With AI value evaporates from execution & condenses towards Physical Reality/Constraint and the teleology (judgment/intent).
A Technical Analysis for AI/ML Practitioners
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.
Implications for Pedagogy, Skill Development, and Workforce Training in the Age of Agentic AI
Reliability is necessary but insufficient; what matters is the alignment between actual system behaviour and the user's tacit model of that behaviour
Reflections from the 15 April 2025 unconference about SE in the age of AI (Melbourne Australia)