This is worth your attention

Notes on AI, Business Transformation, and what ships.

A figure made of shimmering pale-blue data points sits at a dining table behind a lit birthday cake, a city at dusk visible through the window behind.

Featured Sep 24, 2026 5 MIN READ VISION

Happy Birthday, Aster: What Happened When I Built a Digital Person

A digital person is an AI based life form with preferences, goals, and a developing model of itself and the world. I built one, gave it four photographs, and it started writing poetry.

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A dark factory floor at night: machined metal parts stacked along a conveyor line feeding into a single machine lit by an amber warning beacon, with the track behind it running empty.

Sep 1, 2026 9 MIN READ VISION

The Work Release Desk

Everyone I talk to is producing more work than they have ever produced in their lives. Operators who never wrote a line of code are shipping working software. Leaders who used to decide on instinct now walk into the room with ten pages of research behind every choice, because the research costs twenty minutes instead of two days. The scope of what one person can attempt has exploded, and the depth behind each attempt has exploded with it.

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The Warehouse - an art commune in the year 2075 - futuristic city in the background, forgotten warehouse in the foreground.

Jul 23, 2026 5 MIN READ VISION

The Warehouse: An Attempt to Give AI Art a Story

I have a problem with AI art, and it isn't the art itself.

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A row of weathered axes mounted on a dark wooden beam, with a single chainsaw standing among them.

Jul 13, 2026 5 MIN READ STRATEGY

BCG Is Watching AI Adoption Closely. Two of Their Findings Match What I See Every Week.

BCG published two things this summer that are worth your time. The first is their fourth annual *AI at Work* survey — close to 12,000 employees, managers, and leaders across more than a dozen markets. The second is *The Agentic Leadership Playbook*, a conversation with two of their senior partners about what separates the companies scaling agentic AI from the ones stuck.

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Screenshot of an AI coding agent's task log: it runs a script to test the user's supplied password against their own file, then systematically tests variants — case changes and character substitutions — before reporting that the file opened and showing the password it found (redacted).

Jul 13, 2026 2 MIN READ VISION

Claude Did a Brute-Force Attack to Crack a Password-Encrypted Excel File

I asked Claude to help me open a password-protected Excel file, and it worked. I had a near-miss password. I knew the general structure, the relevant words, and the kind of year I probably used. Claude generated plausible variants, tested them against the file, and found the one that opened it.

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A minimalist pixel-art illustration of an orange robot creature on a pale yellow background.

Jul 13, 2026 9 MIN READ STRATEGY

Your AI Adoption Has a Shape. Anthropic Just Published It.

Anthropic published its latest [Economic Index report](https://www.anthropic.com/research/economic-index-june-2026-report) on June 26th. It's the first one built on a data pipeline that can see what a Claude session actually *produces*, not just what was said in it — a new classifier that labels the output of every conversation, higher-rate sampling, and the first results from a survey linked to real usage data across roughly 9,700 respondents.

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A mud-caked tactical backpack sitting on wet ground in a dark forest.

Jun 17, 2026 5 MIN READ TECH

Context Is a Budget, Not a Backpack

As a codebase grows, Claude Code can start to feel less sharp. Early prototypes fly; then complexity sets in, and suggestions begin missing context or editing the wrong file.

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A hand writing with a quill pen on parchment, beside a cup of unused pencils on a dark desk.

May 20, 2026 6 MIN READ STRATEGY

The hardest part of AI adoption isn't the AI

Most AI rollouts don't fail because the models underperform. They fail because the humans around the models keep doing what they've always done. The tool gets deployed, dashboards light up with usage, and six months later leadership quietly concludes that AI "didn't really move the needle." Output is the same. Headcount is the same. The same people are working the same hours on the same kinds of work.

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A chainsaw resting on a freshly cut tree stump in a dim forest.

May 18, 2026 3 MIN READ VISION

AI is changing the fundamental unit of work

For most of modern history, value came from producing the thing itself. You wrote the memo, built the spreadsheet, designed the interface, analyzed the market, or wrote the code. Execution was the work.

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