Think about the last time you were genuinely stuck. Not frustrated stuck or impatient stuck. Genuinely, productively stuck, holding a problem that resisted your first three approaches, that wouldn’t resolve into the frameworks you already had, that required you to sit in the discomfort of…
Something changed recently and almost nobody is talking about what actually changed. Everyone is talking about the capability, what AI can write, generate, solve, produce. The think pieces, the tutorials, the prompting guides, the productivity hacks. All of it focused on what the tool can…
You’ve just moved through thirteen ideas that were always connected. A hammer disappearing. A breakdown that teaches. An assumption buried so deep it felt like reality. A biologist watching frogs and discovering that perception is production. A background that has no bottom. An interpretation that…
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…