We use the word constantly. “The AI knows your preferences.” “It knows the codebase.” “It knows how to write in your style.” We’ve imported the word so casually into our descriptions of these systems that we’ve stopped noticing what the word was doing before we… 

Something genuinely new happened recently. Not incrementally new. Categorically new. For the entire history of software, code was written by humans who understood, imperfectly, partially, but genuinely, what the code was doing and why. The understanding and the artifact were produced by the same process.… 

Every AI system ever built began the same way. Someone looked at a domain, medicine, law, language, chess, driving, coding, and made a list. Of objects. Of properties. Of relationships. Of rules. Of patterns. They took the living, backgrounded, breakdown-navigating reality of human expertise and… 

Every tool you’ve ever used was designed by someone who made assumptions about you. That you would use it in predictable ways. That your goals would be stable and clearly defined before you began. That when something went wrong you would know what went wrong… 

Draw your organization chart. Boxes. Lines. Hierarchy. Reporting relationships. Departments. The visible structure of who is responsible for what. This is how we’re taught to see organizations as structures that can be mapped, optimized, reorganized when they fail. Now throw it away. Not because it’s… 

Consider these four sentences. “It’s cold in here.” “Could you close the window?” “I’ll close the window.” “The window is closed.” In the transmission model of language, these are four descriptions of varying accuracy about a physical situation. Temperature, possibility, intention, state. But watch what… 

Here’s the model of language we all learned implicitly. I have a thought. I encode it into words. I transmit those words to you. You decode them back into the thought. If the transmission is clear and the encoding accurate, you end up with the… 

Here’s what we believe about good thinking. Set aside your assumptions. Look at the facts objectively. Let the evidence speak for itself. Reach conclusions without bias. This is the ideal, the view from nowhere. The neutral observer who sees reality as it actually is, uncontaminated… 

Try to explain how you ride a bicycle. Not the mechanics of a bicycle. How you do it. The actual process of maintaining balance while in motion. What you do with your body when you start to tip. How you initiate a turn. What happens… 

Here’s a question that sounds simple. When you see a red apple, where does the redness come from? The obvious answer, from the apple. The apple reflects certain wavelengths, your eye detects them, your brain processes the signal, you perceive red. Information flows in from…