I built this website by pressing approve, over and over. AI is turning operators into governors who authorize work they don't fully understand.
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Agents & systems design
Designing AI systems backward from what they should change. 15 essays, newest first.
What an Agent Does When It Doesn’t Know What To Do. Or Shouldn’t Do.
Left alone, an agent fills every gap with a confident guess. Fallbacks, escalation and restraint have to be designed in, and they only hold where people can say they're not sure yet.
The Purpose of an Agent Is What It Does
Stafford Beer's rule applied to agents: design backward from the consequence you need. Automating the old process mostly rebuilds the org chart in software.
Taylor Swift Taught Me How To Write Better System and Agent Prompts
Taylor Swift says details shouldn't be strictly decorative. The same rule makes better system prompts: every sentence has to change what the agent does, so delete and test.
Write, summarize, generate: the verbs people use with AI decide what it gets used for. Diagnostic and adversarial verbs produce better questions.
Intelligence is getting cheap to deploy. Deciding what to spend it on becomes the new discipline of leadership, as capital allocation once was.
What the Hell Is an .md File, Anyway?
Opening PowerPoint decides the shape of your thinking before you've done any. A plain-text source layer keeps the thinking intact, so it can be rendered for any audience.
The Brief Used to Go to a Photographer. Now It Goes to a Pipeline.
Why mastering AI creative production now requires thinking like a systems architect
A small film about turning an IKEA bag into a bucket hat. Cheap, frequent story experiments are becoming a real capability for brands, and they make craft matter more.
Brands aren't short of ideas. They're short of engines. This is where the Story Engine came from, and how it connects strategy, narrative and production.
Agencies are buying agentic systems before their people can use a chatbot well. The fix is fluency and a permission structure set by leadership, not another tool.
AI Leadership: Are We Starting from X When We Need Y?
The fear that AI will kill junior talent is Theory X wearing new clothes. Leaders who build AI systems on trust will grow people; leaders who build on control will lose them.
The Agency AI Solution You’re Waiting For Is Already Outdated.
What If We Stopped Treating AI Like a Plugin?
Meet the Synths: How Synthetic Audiences, Powered by AI, Help Us Navigate Change
In a world that’s obsessed with chasing the new, we often overlook those who are quietly, powerfully, becoming someone new.
What Would I Think? Building a Cognitive Twin with AI
When AI moves from being a tool to becoming a container for how you think, you don’t just outsource tasks—you encode judgment.