Why Are We Building the Car Before the Train?
America is racing toward general-purpose AI agents with open-ended agency. China is putting its industrial weight behind AI inside defined systems and workflows. Two centuries of transportation engineering suggest we are handing over the steering wheel before we have laid the track.
The Selection Is the Sentence
Every interaction should do more than one job without asking the user to do more than one thing. The Egyptian canon worked because the second reading was a rule, not a guess.
Tokens Are the New Clicks
The agentic inference-efficiency paradox, and what it does to the capex thesis.
The Travel Time Collapsed
A 1976 foraging model explains why the rational threshold for abandoning a software project just moved — and why that edge expires.
The Room Scales
What the threatened coworker was always going to teach us about agents — and the one auditing test that does not degrade as they get smarter.
The Wrong Knob
Qwen3.8-27B landed for local use this week. The first question everyone asks about it is the least interesting one you can ask — and on a graphics card, your VRAM already answered it.
Where the Equation Flips
The local-versus-cloud line moved while this was being written — and total parameters stopped being the axis it moves along.
When Intelligence Stops Going Vertical, And Spreads Horizontally
Why the next frontier of AI is not a bigger model, but a shared grammar for agents to reason, disagree, and learn together.
The Automatic Transmission Moment
Everyone says the programmer is moving up the stack. Almost no one asks where the stack stops... or what the people resisting it are actually protecting.