The Agent, Not the Task
Compression, Adaptation, and the Limits of Scalar Reward
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.
Beyond the encoding gap: Metafeatures, Swarms, and the Architecture of Discovery
On artificial discovery and its human costs
Beyond the encoding gap: Metafeatures, Swarms, and the Architecture of Discovery
On Artificial Discovery and Its Human Cost
The Residue and the Trace: What AI Cannot Extract from Expert Knowledge
Tacit Knowledge, Training Corpus Boundaries, and the Knowledge AI Cannot Reach
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.
The Archaeological Reversal
When AI sees structure better than you, what can we humans do?
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.
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.
Augmenting Human Intellect in the Age of Agentic AI: Revisiting Engelbart Concepts from 1960s
What Changes When Our Tools Become Agents
Creating reliable Systems from unreliable parts: Thirty Years of Designing Around Uncertainty
Why perfecting AI components is the wrong goal; Orchestration over perfection.
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?
Bounds, not goals: Designing AI Agents that do not drift.
Lessons from biology for human-AI systems
Can AI Agents replace experts?
We have a century of research that says that "context cannot bootstrap understanding"
What the ancients knew about agency.
Freedom in a world accelerated by AI
AI changed what's possible. Knowing whats' worth doing did not get easier
There is history that does not live in artifacts
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
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.
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).
Reasoning Gap: Why Hybrid AI Systems are working so well
A Technical Analysis for AI/ML Practitioners
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.
Feedback Is Substrate
Scale-Free Principles for AI Engineering
Human Purpose vs AI Capability
A strategic briefing note
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
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
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)