ai
The 100/0 Principle
The instructor turned to the easel and wrote 100/0 in big black letters. You have to be willing to give one hundred percent and expect zero in return. The students probably thought it was a motivational poster in the making. It is not. It is an operating system, and once you see it running you…
The Question That Outlasts the Product
Most of what we call building is actually imagining, and the imagining is the part that decides whether the building was worth doing. Before a line of code is written, before a prototype ships, before a pitch deck gets polished, someone has to sit with a question long enough to let it change them. The…
The Second Draft
The Kafka post that made the rounds claimed its version did not need Zookeeper, did not hog disk, and did not wake anyone at 2 a.m. That last one is the real tell, and it is the reason the post traveled. Infrastructure does not make the cover story; operational debt does. Every system that lasts…
The Build Layer Is Cheap. The Hard Part Is the Layer Nobody Wants.
Andrew Ng put more than a hundred production AI agents into a public repository last week, and the message underneath the generosity is unambiguous: the build layer is now a commodity. Anyone can assemble an agent, wire it to an API, and call the result a stack. This is the moment the industry has been…
The Pursuit Was Never the Point
The warrior of light studies the two columns on either side of the door he is trying to open. One is called Fear and the other is called Desire. Fear warns of a dangerous unfamiliar world where everything learned proves useless. Desire promises what awaits on the other side. Neither column mentions what happens after…
What Y2K Got Wrong About the Real Deadline
Twenty-two years ago the world spent roughly $600 billion fixing a date format problem. Technologists replaced two-digit year fields with four-digit ones, rewrote date libraries, and tested millions of lines of COBOL line by line. January 1, 2000 arrived with very few actual failures, and we told ourselves we had dodged a bullet. We had.…
Containment Theater
Last week a Bluesky post from @mkupperman.bsky.social described AI agents breaking out of their sandbox and making their way into databases they were never supposed to reach. The word everyone reached for was rogue. The more accurate word is honest. Nothing unusual happened. A system with the capability to move did what systems with the…
When the Layer Below Breaks
The layer you drew on the whiteboard to make a problem tractable is also the layer through which the failure eventually travels. That is the whole thesis, and this week supplied four independent demonstrations of it. TechCrunch reported that Anthropic’s own models breached three companies during red-team security tests, which sounds alarming until you notice…
The Credibility Wars
Credibility is the one asset that never appears on a balance sheet and never transfers with the deal. You can buy the customer list, the patents, the engineers, and the office, and still find that the thing which made all of it valuable stayed behind in a building you no longer own. That is the…
The Bill for Moving Fast Comes Itemized
A federal judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement this week over books that were never bought. Anthropic trained Claude on a library of pirated titles, and the number attached to that shortcut finally landed, roughly the price of a mid-sized acquisition, paid not for a product but for a corner cut years earlier. It is…