Essays
Pieces I stand behind.
- Writing for the Next Model
The stronger the model, the more it needs the one who directs it
- On Nadella's token capital
The clearest case for the AI-era firm, and the floor it stops one short of.
- The prompt is not the question
When you prompt a model you are not giving it the task, you are giving it evidence about what you want. Why it hands you the average reading, why being distinctive makes the miss worse, and where the gap goes when you try to build it out.
- Shape of thought
The scarce thing in discovery is not a stronger generator or a sharper judge, but the structure that brings the right move within reach. The shape of the library in the head.
- None of them chose the game
Machines climb the measures we hand them. None has set its own, and maybe we have not either.
- The layer that remembers people
The living part of taste is per-person and sits outside the weights. The densest map of it already exists, and we threw it away by reading it as a score.
- Cognition went public
Reflexivity has moved one level deeper, and most participants have not noticed.
- The coupled recursion
The corpus does not just accumulate. It shapes the cognition that produces the next corpus.
- The May 2026 Joint Ventures Between AI Labs and Private Equity
Main essay: The Substrate Inversion
- The Substrate Inversion
What the labs are actually buying
- Why code compiles and law doesn't
The next AI transition is gated on who builds the verifier, not who trains the biggest model.
- Building AI Product
I Spent Two Days Speccing a Product I’ve Never Used. Here’s What I Should Have Done Instead.
- The Architecture of Discovery
What AlphaGo revealed about thinking
- Compiled Away
A Map of What Gets Automated Next
- The Taste Compiler
How to build real-time taste inference for generative systems
- The Missing Taste Model
Create with AI needs a compass, not a generator
- (note to self) From Punch Cards to Python, From Python to Agents
How the agentic shift will redefine the best builder
- A Mesh Is Not a Door
Why world models will be won in game engines, then move into Physical AI
- Pixels → Protocols
A2A turns SaaS into an execution layer. Operability becomes distribution.
- Language-Conditioned Knowledge Inequality
Measuring quality-adjusted knowledge diffusion across language communities, and diagnosing language-dependent performance gaps in agentic knowledge work.
- What Enchantment Means When You Don’t Believe
A rationalist’s attempt to name awe without overreach.
- The Inference Lead in the LLM Era
What data science becomes after LLMs
- The New Information Supply Chain
When the cost of knowledge goes to 0, humans become the bottleneck and value moves downstream.
- By Logic We Prove; By Intuition We Discover
Why today’s LLMs are great proof engines, and why the next 2-3 years belong to “silent” discovery architectures
- The Evolution of Artificial Cognition
Five Layers of Abstraction