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Round four. Same rules as May and June : dig up what tech leaders said about AI in a given month, hold it against what actually happened. 🍷 aged like wine, 🥛 aged like milk, 🤷 jury’s still out. June had WWDC, May had Google I/O, but July has no single keynote to anchor it. What it has instead is manifestos and pledges: the industry and its regulators keep using July to announce how…
This is a shitpost if you have any issue with it, and a proposal for a conference talk if you’re willing to pay at least travel expenses and a bottle of champagne. TESCREAL, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, and cute/acc look like three opposing factions in the ideology wars of the near future. None of them are Luddites, which is worth noting once and then moving past, since…
Round three. Same rules as April and May : dig up what tech leaders said about AI in a given month, hold it against what actually happened. 🍷 aged like wine, 🥛 aged like milk, 🤷 jury’s still out. June is Apple month, thanks to WWDC. That makes it reliably rich for this series; 2024 was an especially good vintage. 2022 Pre-ChatGPT. June 2022 brought the episode that perhaps shows most…
Disclosure first: I am not diagnosed with ADHD. I know it well from family and friends, I notice traits in myself, and I assume I have subclinical levels of the condition. So this isn’t as someone with ADHD - but whether you call it ADHD or not is not really the point; the phenomena I describe will likely be relatable for quite a lot of people regardless of formal diagnosis.
Back for round two. Same rules as April : dig up what tech leaders said about AI in a given month over the past four years, hold it against what actually happened. 🍷 aged like wine, 🥛 aged like milk, 🤷 jury’s still out. May is a dense month. Google I/O lands here every year, so does Microsoft Build, and for whatever cosmic reason a lot of OpenAI drama also clusters in May.
The espresso machine at Cogentiv.ai is a twelve-thousand-euro Slayer with a custom brass drip tray that Malte had engraved with the company mission statement. The portafilter is shaped, I swear to god, like a small instrument of pleasure. Malte (our founder, thirty-seven, in the vestments of his order: Arc’teryx Veilance gilet, Lemaire tee, Salomons that have never met a trail) is pulling a…
In which a year passes and the narrator does not, in any meaningful sense, refuse. (This is one of three branches continuing from Part 1: The Week I Lost the Plot at Cogentiv.ai . The other two: 2b: Feierabend and 2c: Sacred Deceleration .) The Slayer is gone. In its place there’s a matte-black monolith about the size of a filing cabinet, dispensing a bespoke nutrient paste that Malte (our…
In which a year passes and the narrator does not, in any dramatic sense, escape. (This is one of three branches continuing from Part 1: The Week I Lost the Plot at Cogentiv.ai . The other two: 2a: Apotheosis and 2c: Sacred Deceleration .) A year has passed. The Friday after the balcony I walked to Dussmann and bought a cheap Leuchtturm: A5, dot grid, hardcover, the cheapest they had. I…
In which a year passes and the founder, for the wrong reasons, does some of the right things. (This is one of three branches continuing from Part 1: The Week I Lost the Plot at Cogentiv.ai . The other two: 2a: Apotheosis and 2b: Feierabend .) A year had passed. I’d bought a notebook and filled it — one honest sentence a day, starting with the coffee is cold now . Ines, my manager, had taken…
This is the companion piece to a short story about losing the plot at a fictional Berlin AI startup. If you want the story first, start here . If you’re just here for the vocabulary — names for what intensive AI use does to cognition, bodies, teams, and codebases — skip to the cheat sheet . Like many software developers, I’ve been running Claude Code on a Max subscription at the 20x…
In March and April I gave a two-part workshop on AI coding agents for a German software and security firm. Part 1 was on security and quality; Part 2 on cognitive, material, and ideological costs. Both decks, released under CC BY-ND 4.0: Part 1 — Security & Quality for Practitioners (PDF) Part 2 — Side Effects May Include… (PDF)
I’ve been writing a policy for AI-assisted development at an open-source project, and somewhere between “who’s responsible for code nobody read line by line” and “what happens when review capacity can’t keep up with production,” I realized I wasn’t writing a policy anymore. I was drawing a system dynamics diagram on the back of an envelope. So I had…
There’s a genre of tech journalism that Karl Bode calls “CEO said a thing journalism”: a CEO makes a prediction, the press reports it as news, and nobody comes back twelve months later to check whether it was true. This is me coming back. I dug up what tech leaders said about AI in April over the last four years and held it against what actually happened. If this is fun, maybe…
I’ve been working on an AI policy for a client’s software project recently, and I needed a way to express something that kept coming up in conversations: not whether AI was involved in producing something, but how much human judgment went into the result . The binary “AI-generated: yes/no” that most disclosure policies default to is useless. A developer who uses Copilot for…
