Ideas for building things that work.
The real story of AI agents in the workplace isn't about collaboration. It's about who controls the narrative of your own replacement. There's a particular genre of workplace advice that only appears when something genuinely threatening is happening. You can recognize it by its
The airline industry doesn't have a consolidation problem. It has a clarity problem—and regulators just spent three years proving they don't understand the difference. There's a particular kind of institutional self-deception that only becomes visible in retrospect, when the patient dies on
Security cameras promised to watch everything so you wouldn't have to. They're now generating so much confident nonsense that you've stopped trusting what you see. There's a specific kind of failure that only becomes possible after a technology succeeds. Your home security
For the entire history of brand-building, the audience has been human. You built perception in human heads. You did it through repetition, consistency, story, and credibility — slow, accumulated signals that eventually formed an impression worth something at the moment of choice. The audience just changed. Increasingly, the first audience
America's unemployment system wasn't built for AI displacement. But that's almost beside the point — it was barely working before. There's a particular kind of institutional denial that happens when a system faces a threat it wasn't designed to handle:
Investors are stampeding into senior housing chasing an 80-million-person demographic wave. They've correctly identified the opportunity and almost entirely misunderstood it. There is something almost philosophically impressive about an industry that can look at a known, fully documented, decades-in-advance demographic wave and still manage to build the wrong
For the past three years, millions of people have been running the same experiment. Most just don't realize it. The experiment goes something like this: "What if I could remove the hard part?" What if I could remove the years of learning? What if I could
The asset you spent thirty years building is quietly degrading—and the psychological machinery that made you feel safe is the same machinery ensuring you won't notice until it's too late. --- There is a particular cruelty in the way deferred maintenance works. It is
For forty years software engineering research has been telling us the same thing: the bottleneck isn't typing code. It's understanding reality. AI is finally proving it. Every technological bubble develops a strange relationship with reality. The railway bubble believed every town needed a railway. The dot-com
Meta isn't breaking its employees with AI. It's revealing what it always thought of them. There's a particular kind of corporate cruelty that disguises itself as transformation. You recognize it by its grammar: words like adapt , evolve , embrace , and era . These are words that
Europeans aren't buying solar panels and heat pumps because they love the planet. They're buying them because they've stopped trusting the system that's supposed to keep them warm. There's a particular kind of consumer behavior that economists misclassify as rational
The tools exist. The problem was never the tools. It was that we confused paying for software with valuing our time—and now we're about to make the same mistake in the opposite direction. There's a peculiar ritual that happens every January. Someone opens their
There is a comforting story circulating in leadership decks right now, and it goes like this: AI is going to fix the parts of our marketing that aren't working. It's going to make the slow teams faster, the unclear briefs clearer, the underperforming campaigns more efficient.
We built instruments to measure a world that no longer exists. Now we're flying blind while arguing about the altitude. There's a particular kind of institutional blindness that only reveals itself after catastrophic decisions have already been made. The instruments looked fine. The readings were consistent.
Workers aren't turning to AI because it's a better mentor. They're turning to it because the human alternative has quietly collapsed—and everyone in the system has agreed to pretend otherwise. There's a peculiar confession buried inside the AI career coaching