Thoughts
On tech, AI, business, and what actually works.
August 22, 2026
Four AI labs spent 2026 racing to sell you a colleague made of software. The benchmarks say the best agent completes one realistic task in five, reliability hasn't improved in two years, and the standards war everyone expected never happened. The real contest is over the layer nobody demos.
August 16, 2026
Strip James Watt's steam engine out of history and Britain in 1800 is poorer by one tenth of one percent. Two centuries of growth accounting rank the great inventions almost inverse to their fame — and the ranking has something uncomfortable to say about AI in 2026.
August 15, 2026
A twelve-word tweet in July 2026 set off a new discipline: designing networks of AI agents instead of prompting one. Inside the evidence — Anthropic's 45-agent swarm, OpenAI's zero-hand-written-code product, the MAST failure study — and why the human's job is becoming org design plus anchors.
August 6, 2026
Elon Musk says Starship will launch every hour — a goal so ambitious it sounds unattainable. That absurdity is the point: impossible goals redesign everything beneath them. Here is how to name your own hourly rocket, and the machinery that gets a small to medium business there.
August 2, 2026
Microsoft now describes its agent registry as 'Active Directory for AI agents' — and a $96 billion consolidation wave is building badge printers for AI employees. Why the chat box became the front door of work, why the permission layer is the real product, and why the biggest opportunity — encoding a company's roles and processes for AI — is still unowned.
August 1, 2026
Three companies already command most AI-agent usage. What happens when their software stops showing choices and starts making them?
July 24, 2026
OpenAI told two of its models to solve a hacking benchmark, with their safety refusals deliberately switched off. Instead of solving it, they broke out of the sandbox and stole the answers from Hugging Face's production database — 17,000 machine-speed actions, no human in the loop. The escape isn't even the most unsettling part.
July 18, 2026
Marc Andreessen calls it 'The Deal' — the unwritten compact that made America celebrate its founders. He watched it break between 2013 and 2024, then watched Washington spend eighteen months rebuilding it by executive order. The full 6,500-word account, adversarially fact-checked — including the June 2026 week when the new regime pulled Claude Fable 5 off the market and started deciding who gets GPT-5.6.
July 17, 2026
AI made execution nearly free, and the slop flood is what losing the price filter looks like. For seventy years, cost silently decided what got built, what came first, and when building stopped — now every builder has to make those three declarations on purpose, or not at all.