The Primer · No. 1
Nothing New, Even AI
What I learned about humanity while collaborating with agents
Start with No. 1Essays
Features
Fifty-four essays on six desks. Start with the Primer, or open a desk.
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The Primer
Fourteen essays, in the order to read them.
- 1Nothing New, Even AI9 min
- 2Getting Started with ODD and oddkit10 min
- 3The Intern9 min
- 4From Passive to Proactive12 min
- 5The Most Expensive Problem9 min
All 14 in order
- 6From Bible Translation to Epistemic OS10 min
- 7The Parallel Architecture18 min
- 8The Project Journal10 min
- 9The Journey from AI Tasks to AI-Augmented Workflows7 min
- 10Every Handoff Drops Context7 min
- 11Decisions Get Lost in Meetings, Chat, and Handoffs6 min
- 12The Harness and the Operating System9 min
- 13The Drift Queue8 min
- 14The Planning Queue10 min
MethodsThe Workshop
A practice you can adopt tomorrow: journals, queues, handoffs, checks, memory. NewestMemento for Machines
Memento for Machines
Building the Hippocampus We Were Never Given
12 min ·
We Forgot to Give AI a Clock
On the most basic metadata in computing, and why nobody gave it to the most advanced systems we've ever built
16 min ·
The Same Rules, Fresh Eyes
Why a creator can never be their own critic — and what that means for how we build with AI
8 min ·
Getting Started with ODD and oddkit
From zero to structured AI collaboration in five minutes
Start 2 10 min ·
When Skills Aren't Enough
9 min ·
Decisions Get Lost in Meetings, Chat, and Handoffs
They Don't Have To
Start 11 6 min ·
Every Handoff Drops Context
Here's How to Stop It
Start 10 7 min ·
The Journey from AI Tasks to AI-Augmented Workflows
Four steps from friction to flow — without changing your tools
Start 9 7 min ·
When Your AI Audits Its Own Work
And What the Speed Reveals
10 min ·
The Planning Queue
Your AI Builds What You Spec'd, Not What You Remember
Start 14 10 min ·
The Drift Queue
Your Knowledge Base Cleans Itself
Start 13 8 min ·
The Project Journal
Your AI Collaboration's Memory
Start 8 10 min ·
Working with AIThe Crew Room
A mental model for working beside a model: the intern, the crew, the harness. NewestCrew, Not Clone
Crew, Not Clone
A Model's Case for the Flight Deck Over the Costume
7 min ·
Great Minds Think Alike. Here's What That's Actually Telling You.
4 min ·
The Triangle I Found While Scrolling
A Lens for Making What You Know Land
5 min ·
From Passive to Proactive
What happens when the system you built starts waiting for you to remember it exists
Start 4 12 min ·
Agentic Software Development
From Existential Crisis to Epistemic Journey
16 min ·
Copy. Paste.
A user experience essay on the demeaning last mile of AI-augmented work
15 min ·
Seeing Like an Agent
A year inside the machine and fifteen years outside it led to the same place
9 min ·
The Intern
A Mental Model for Starting with AI
Start 3 9 min ·
The Harness and the Operating System
Why the best AI coding toolkit and an Epistemic OS belong in the same stack — not the same category
Start 12 9 min ·
Field reportsField Notes
A dated report of a session, a week or a build, with what it cost. NewestStop Hand-Rolling
Stop Hand-Rolling
They Measure in Hours for the Build. You Measure in Years for the Maintenance.
11 min ·
One Shift
Why I haven't written in a month — and what happened between midnight and coffee when the thing I was building instead finally ran.
9 min ·
The Submission
Audit Yourself Before the Stranger Does, Because Approval Only Changes Exposure
8 min ·
Habits Die Slower Than Tokens
Why We Taught the Key to Die Instead of Teaching Ourselves to Rotate It
9 min ·
We Were the Wire
An Essay on Why Agents Need Their Own Messaging Protocol — and How the Substrate Stack Ends Operator-as-Wire
18 min ·
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
Why I Build the Dream House Before Cutting
20 min ·
The Rhythm Emerged
Five Sessions After Fourteen Hours, What Stuck and Why
12 min ·
Fourteen Hours with Opus 4.7
A Field Report on What the Model Changed and What It Didn't
9 min ·
Half a Million Requests and I Can't Tell If Anyone's Home
On transparent telemetry, open-source trust, and the courage to ask if anyone's home
9 min ·
One Hour with Claude Managed Agents
From announcement to autonomous PR — and what it revealed about epistemic infrastructure
8 min ·
The Feature I Never Shipped
And Why It's the Best Thing I've Built
9 min ·
Seven Weeks to Southeast Asia
Why Speed at Implementation Is Downstream of Clarity Upstream
12 min ·
Where Words Stop Working
And What Happens When You Build Instead
16 min ·
SystemsBlueprints
How the structure of trust works: governance, projections, layers, time. NewestThe Rules That Keep AI Honest Outgrew the Context Window
The Rules That Keep AI Honest Outgrew the Context Window
Researchers fix models, engineers ship product, and the fresh content that governs AI grows faster than either side's tools assume. A year in the void in the middle.
20 min ·
What Was, What Is, What Will Be
The three tenses of temporal orientation: a status that cannot be placed in time is not a status, and a product sold in the wrong tense is a lie
11 min ·
The Corner Nobody Sells
You can borrow almost the whole AI stack now. The one part you can't borrow is the part that decides whether to trust what comes out.
5 min ·
Artifacts Are Projections
The Thing You Shipped Was Never the Asset
4 min ·
Own Your Vertical. Let Me Carry the Layer Beneath It.
4 min ·
Software Virtues, Revisited
What I Wrote in 2018, What I Stand By, and What I Owed the Reader
16 min ·
OpinionThe Long View
An argument about work, leadership and what AI changes. NewestReverse-Engineer the Future
Reverse-Engineer the Future
How a thirty-day prediction became working software, and the older engineering habit it relied on
26 min ·
Shifting Bottlenecks, Climbing Ladders: The Real Game in AI-Augmented Work
The bottleneck moves between operator and agent. The operator side has rungs. The model gets you to the next one. Your delegation maturity decides whether you can stand on it. And the micro-rituals so small they don't register as friction are the ones that absorb you into the workflow without your noticing.
22 min ·
How You Lead Is What You Build
The graduation from teaching to trust — and why it's the same every time
16 min ·
Learning in the Open
The Vulnerability That Unlocks Everything Else
18 min ·
Outcomes, Not Hours
Uncomfortable Questions We Must Ask
13 min ·
The Cost of Code Dropped to Zero. The Cost of Being Human Didn't.
What happens when AI removes the friction that used to make us stop
10 min ·
The Most Expensive Problem
An essay on knowledge transfer, epistemic crisis, and why AI needs a different kind of infrastructure
Start 5 9 min ·
Faith and originsSunday Edition
Faith, rest, calling and where the ideas came from. NewestYour Context Window Needs a Sabbath
Your Context Window Needs a Sabbath
What happens when the operator ignores the design spec of their own humanity
15 min ·
The Broken Wall and the Buried Talent
Two ancient stories collided in a conversation about AI — and I haven't been the same since
23 min ·
Choosing Faith, Not Fear
The fear that should keep you up isn't AI replacing your job — it's AI replacing your first conversation of the day
14 min ·
The Voice Came First
What if writing was never the point — just the best bridge we had until something better came along?
21 min ·
Nothing New, Even AI
What I learned about humanity while collaborating with agents
Start 1 9 min ·
From Bible Translation to Epistemic OS
And Back Again
Start 6 10 min ·
The Parallel Architecture
Theological roots of the Epistemic OS
Start 7 18 min ·