The Language That Does Not Yet Exist
· 9 min read
What a failed machine language taught me about measuring communication
Counting what I delegated to AI
· 10 min read
What I learned trying to count a year of work I handed to AI models
Harnessie
· 5 min read
The night before taking my multi-agent harness public, I mined my own portfolio for reusable ideas. What I found changed how I describe the whole project.
The Holiday Weekend Scam Call
· 2 min read
The after-hours call over a holiday weekend, demanding you verify yourself right now, is a scam. It can wait until Monday.
Audit Thyself?
· 5 min read
AI models can't grade their own blind spot very well. People don't either.
Vocabulary Debt
· 5 min read
One word naming four systems used to just confuse people. Now it makes your AI confident, precise, and dead wrong.
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
· 5 min read
Two models and a judge beat the best single frontier model. The lift lives in the reconciling, not the genius. Same law runs your org.
Intelligence: Rent or Own?
· 5 min read
Open-weight is two quarters behind the frontier and closing. For anything you'll run indefinitely, the math has tipped, and the buying window looks a lot like 2020.
Solution Shapes
· 4 min read
Organizations buy the shape they already know how to operate, then wonder why it never fits the problem.
On Time or Ready?
· 4 min read
The clock says 7:58 PM. But the curtain doesn't move until everyone is ready.
Your AI Agent Reads Setup Guides You Can't Fully See
· 5 min read
AI agents follow setup guides through HTML, PDFs, and terminal output. Those surfaces can hide instructions from you but not from the model. GuideCheck is an open standard that makes the whole instruction surface reviewable before an agent acts.
Turnstile or "On The List"?
· 4 min read
Stripe shipped agent payments. The language for what agents may do was already open and free.
Last to Know
· 5 min read
The job changed from doing tasks to keeping queues coherent. The question has to change with it to stay useful.
Behind the Wall
· 4 min read
David Soria Parra, MCP co-creator, at AI Engineer Europe this week: "2026 is the year agents go to production." Not a prediction.
One AGENTS.md, every tool: how I stopped copy-pasting CLAUDE.md everywhere
· 5 min read
Every AI coding assistant wants its own instruction file at a different path. I forked a tiny Go CLI that fixes it with symlinks — and added detect, scan, auto-hooks, and global-config support.
Too potent to ship
· 5 min read
This is the team that built the capability looking at the test results and concluding: uh-oh, this is way too potent for broad deployment right now.
The Gap Nobody Owns
· 5 min read
Right now, somewhere in your organization, four different teams are managing four different slices of AI risk.
Shared Operational Language
· 5 min read
Something quietly shifted in the last year. The format used to describe what a person can do and the format used to describe what an AI agent can do are converging. Same structure. Same questions:
Your site works fine in a browser. AI agents can't use it.
· 4 min read
Most websites silently break when AI agents try to use them. I built a free scanner that shows you exactly where and why.
Skills: Have < Use
· 5 min read
Two weeks ago we flagged the vocabulary fork. Last week we showed that skills were never guarantees to begin with.
Knowledge as Code: A Pattern for Knowledge Bases That Verify Themselves
· 6 min read
Apply software engineering practices to knowledge management: plain text, Git-native, zero-dependency, self-healing through AI verification cascades, multi-output from a single source.
EveryAILaw: A Structured Database of AI Compliance Obligations Across Jurisdictions
· 2 min read
Open-source reference tracking AI regulation obligations across 12 regulations and 8 authorities, with a JSON API and MCP server for programmatic access.
Skills Are Bets, Not Gates
· 4 min read
Last week we flagged the vocabulary fork: "skills" now means two different things depending on which room you're in.
I built an open spec because every bad 429 was costing me twice
· 5 min read
Your API's rate limit errors are generating more traffic than they prevent. Graceful Boundaries is an open spec that makes every refusal self-explanatory.
Skills Ain't What They Used to Be
· 4 min read
For as long as most of us have been working, "skills" meant one thing: what people can do.
HardGuard25: A 25-character alphabet for human-readable unique IDs
· 2 min read
An open ID alphabet that removes 11 confusable characters instead of Crockford Base32's 4. JS, Python, and Go. MIT licensed.
A New Layer of Trust
· 13 min read
How the blend of systems measures and human behavior measures compliment each other to form the new trust needed in the age of AI.
The Verb is the Tell
· 4 min read
Listen closely to how people at your org talk about AI. The verb they reach for tells you everything.
The Rulebook Doesn't Exist Yet
· 4 min read
Last week I taught 27 L&D professionals in a 3-day AI certificate program. The very same week, I entered a hackathon and landed at NEARCON, a conference packed with crypto-native builders racing towar
The Understanding Trap
· 6 min read
Last week I wrote about the dangers of saying "not my job" about AI. This week, I promised we'd talk about what to build.
Teach Your AI Coding Agent to Run Accessibility Audits
· 5 min read
A reusable agent skill for WCAG 2.1 AA audits using axe-core and Lighthouse. Works with Claude Code, Codex, and other AI agents.
"Not My Job" is Predictive
· 4 min read
When I present about AI or teach skills to people who are warm to the idea, I keep hearing the same pushback: "That's not my job."
Your AI Agent Skills Have a Version Control Problem
· 5 min read
A meta-skill for tracking agent skill versions across stateless sessions, surfaces, and platforms. Works with Claude, Codex, Gemini CLI, and any agentskills.io-compatible system.
The Yes Problem
· 9 min read
How organizations can move from AI pilots to production by engineering safe approval paths into workflows, not policies.
The Weight of Avoidance
· 5 min read
You know that feeling when you've been avoiding the bathroom scale?
AI Tool Watch: Stop Googling 'Can I Use That AI Feature on the Free Plan'
· 4 min read
A hypeless open-source reference for AI capabilities, pricing tiers, platform support, and availability across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and more.
I Wrote a Script to Fix Audible's Unreadable PDF Filenames
· 4 min read
A Python CLI that renames Audible PDF companions from cryptic codes like bk_adbl_022796.pdf to their actual book titles. Three-tier extraction: metadata, text, OCR.
The Copilot Problem
· 6 min read
A [recent story](https://archive.ph/UjhW0) about a physician and an AI tool has sparked debate about whether AI belongs in clinical settings. But the incident pattern it describes isn't new, and it is
How Do You Measure Whether Someone Is Actually Good at Working With AI?
· 5 min read
The engineering problem behind measuring human-AI collaboration quality: why quizzes don't work, what behavioral assessment looks like, and how we built an adaptive simulator to measure it.
The Great AI Misallocation
· 17 min read
A clear-eyed look at how organizations are misallocating AI spend and eroding trust through tooling-first decisions.
The One-Hour Year
· 5 min read
I'm not big on Twitter/X, but these two tweets with combined 22 million views tell a compelling story about where we are as 2026 kicks off.
AI Lives In The Default Path
· 11 min read
Most orgs are trying to drive AI adoption with tools, training, and enthusiasm.
Typecasting L&D as The AI Hype Department
· 5 min read
More and more, organizations are asking L&D to lead AI readiness, run AI sessions, or get people excited about their AI-enabled future.
Friction Creates Shape
· 4 min read
Here in the US, it’s Thanksgiving week. That means an overload of gratitude posts for all the usual accelerators: breakthroughs, mentors, tools, breakthroughs pretending to be tools. There’s no wrong way to be thankful, but let’s take a different angle.
Synthetic Trust
· 2 min read
Modern teams trust tone more than truth. Confident output passes as credible long before its reasoning is verified.
PAICE.work Vision & Partnership whitepaper
· 1 min read
Making AI Collaboration Measurable,Teachable, and Governable
Human Interface Fatigue
· 3 min read
_The more “human-friendly” our tools become, the more mental overhead they create._
Confidence & Calibration
· 2 min read
Confidence used to be a proxy for competence. AI changed that. The differentiator now is calibration.
Immature AI Maturity
· 2 min read
Most AI maturity frameworks measure self-assessment and inflated usage data. Real maturity is the gap between what you believe you understand and what you can actually explain.
Success at the PAICE of Work
· 2 min read
PAICE is live. It measures what adoption metrics don't — how humans and AI actually perform together.
The Trust Gap
· 3 min read
AI adoption isn't waiting for anyone. Employees are already ahead. The Trust Gap is upon us — and Integrators hold the keys.
GPT-5 Changes the Game (Mostly Doesn't)
· 2 min read
The long-awaited iteration of the model that started the public love/hate affair with AI landed last week. And (predictably) the reaction is still love/hate.
Issue 010
· 3 min read
Your sales funnel is losing leads faster than you think, and the loss starts long before a salesperson speaks to anyone.
Governance is Now a UX Problem
· 3 min read
AI is blowing past the usual internal governance frameworks.
Utah Taiko Experience 3
· 1 min read
10 days of Japanese drumming and enjoying natural beauty of Utah
Align to the Spec, Not to the Prompt
· 4 min read
A quiet but meaningful shift is underway: developers, product teams, and AI leaders are realizing that _alignment to the spec_ is what matters. And that starts with crafting the spec with care.
Open, auditable AI stacks just shipped!
· 3 min read
No, this wasn’t in [America’s AI Action Plan](https://www.ai.gov/action-plan) that grabbed headlines this week. Though it probably should have been.
Culture is a Technical Dependency
· 3 min read
Tech teams ship AI features in weeks. But the human systems around them still run on quarterly cadences.
When AI Outpaces Our Senses & Expectations
· 3 min read
When machines operate in contexts we can't perceive, trust breaks down. Not because the tool is wrong — because the interface to human confidence is missing.
Signals & Subtractions Issue 005
· 3 min read
Created by Sam Rogers** · Published by [Snap Synapse](https://snapsynapse.com) for people who prefer clarity over clutter
Signals & Subtractions – Issue 002
· 3 min read
AI adoption is accelerating. No surprise there. But while AI *tools* multiply, the **decision** **rights**, **governance structures**, and **coordination mechanisms** around them lag behind.
The Difference Between Strategic Alignment and Decisioning Intelligence
· 1 min read
Alignment is table stakes. Intelligence in decision-making is what separates the competent from the catalytic.
Why Governance Breaks Under Pressure
· 1 min read
Governance models often fail at the exact moment we need them most. Here's why -- and what to do about it.
Perspectives on Exponential Change
· 3 min read
From the side, it's curve. But when you're standing on it...
Sam's Rails for Technology
· 5 min read
Until we put our tech on some rails, it can only take us off the rails.
Update - High School Reunion Edition
· 5 min read
If you haven't talked to me in 30 years, here's what's new.
Just dumb enough
· 2 min read
The value of asking stupid questions, doing daunting work, and looking foolish.
Advice for people managing learning programs
· 2 min read
From someone who already made those mistakes.
Water Availability & Storage
· 2 min read
Water rights do not create water in the drought-stricken American Southwest.
5 Bullet Intro
· 2 min read
I was asked for 3-5 bullet introduction at work. Here’s what I gave them.
Speaking at Empower HR Tech Americas
· 3 min read
Co-presenting "Dare To Care" at Empower HR Tech Americas 2022.
Afghans still need our help!
· 2 min read
Practical ways to help Afghan refugees after public attention moved elsewhere.
Raspberry Pi is 64-Bit now
· 1 min read
One of the things keeping my Pi from being more useful just changed.
Closing up when someone dies, part 2: Digital Identity
· 3 min read
Another list you'll never need, until you do.
The work is free
· 2 min read
Someone asked me recently if I’d ever done any work for free, and if I enjoyed it.
Finally backed up
· 2 min read
It's been a while since I had this feeling, I don't quite trust it yet.
Why Measure Workplace Training?
· 9 min read
Why workplace training needs just enough measurement to support good decisions.
"Helping Deciders Decide" for ISPI Hampton Roads
· 2 min read
Presenting to ISPI Hampton Roads on stakeholder alignment in L&D.
Annual disaster mitigation recommendations
· 2 min read
Twelve monthly steps for building a practical disaster-preparedness plan.
You support what you eat
· 2 min read
Choosing a plant-based diet changes personal health risks and the industries you support.
Estonia, e-Residency, and what I believe will come
· 5 min read
How Estonia's digital governance could pioneer a new kind of internet.
Healthcare Elsewhere: Medical
· 5 min read
Don't get treatment in the USA if you can help it -- and you probably can.
The Best Unique Identifiers that I can identify
· 4 min read
I couldn't find anything, so I made this up.
Healthcare Elsewhere: Dental
· 2 min read
Don't do dental work in the USA if you can help it -- and you probably can.
Why I Do Social Media Fasts
· 4 min read
Once a year I take a month off social media to remember what the rest of life is like. This year I timed it with the altMBA. Way better.
Navigation of Video eLearning
· 8 min read
The basics of video navigation from an eLearning perspective
Learning Asset Framework -- A Proposal in Process
· 2 min read
What is the minimum viable spec for corporate training? A framework proposal for an industry that talks about learning as if it's a thing without ever agreeing on what kind of thing.
Podcasting for Learning & Development
· 2 min read
I wanted to hear how others in L&D were solving the problems they faced. Podcasts turned out to be the next best thing to hallway conversations at conferences.
Not Even Wrong
· 2 min read
Adam Savage called it at DevLearn: sometimes we don't know enough to even be wrong. What do you do when someone's fundamental understanding is so absent they can't yet ask a useful question?
ATD 2016 as a New Speaker
· 3 min read
What it's actually like to speak at the biggest L&D conference in the world -- and why the hallways are worth more than the sessions.
My Excellent Adventures in Learning & Development
· 3 min read
How a temp job retyping training manuals at a mortgage company accidentally launched a 20-year career in L&D.
How to Produce 90 eLearning Videos in 8 Weeks
· 4 min read
Google had a problem. We solved it by producing the YouTube Certified online training program -- 90 videos in 8 weeks, 10x more professionals trained in the following year.
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