Blog Archive

All Posts

Essays on AI, agentic systems, and the evolution of digital consciousness

181 posts

Featured

The Velvet Rope Was a Turnstile

Anthropic just released Fable 5, a Mythos-class model for everyone, eight days after filing its S-1 and days after calling for a brake pedal on frontier AI. The danger narrative ended exactly when the monetization was ready - and one of the three 'safety' classifiers guards the moat, not the public.

Read more →

The Control Group Quit

METR tried to rerun its developer-productivity study and couldn't, because developers refused to work without AI even for a few research tasks. The experiment that could tell us whether AI helps now has no control group. We opted out of finding out.

Read more →
Featured

It Was Always an IPO

Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 on June 1 at a $965B valuation, eclipsing OpenAI. Read backwards from the filing, the last two years stop looking like a safety lab's awkward compromises and start looking like a pre-IPO playbook executed on schedule.

Read more →

Cheap Is a Hardware Strategy

Google led I/O 2026 with a cheap, fast Gemini Flash instead of a frontier behemoth, and everyone read it as conceding the top of the market. Wrong read. Cheap isn't a model strategy, it's a silicon strategy. Google owns every layer from the TPU to the search box, which is why it can give intelligence away while its rivals rent the compute to compete with it, some of them for $40 billion.

Read more →

The Last Slow Thing

Everything in software got a fast mode this year except understanding what to build. The proof is in the labs' own org charts: the companies selling the models that supposedly end software engineering are paying $600k for engineers to go sit in customers' offices. The bottleneck moved all the way up to the conversation.

Read more →

Security Review Moved Into the Loop

Anthropic's new security-guidance plugin is built entirely on hooks. It fires on every edit, turn, and commit, hands the diff to a second Claude with fresh context, and fixes findings in the same session. It catches vulnerabilities before they reach the PR. It also doesn't block a single one, and that's the honest part.

Read more →

Agents Don't Refactor

Traditional coders touched a file and tidied it. The Boy Scout Rule. Now nobody does. Agents add, they don't subtract, and the codebase accretes faster than ever. A technique for putting cleanup back in as an explicit gate, not a virtue you hope for.

Read more →
Featured

Don't Take Their Legos Away

A CTO once told me not to take people's Legos away. I ignored him, solved the team's problems myself, and got exactly what I optimised for: a sound plan and a team that couldn't stand me. In 2026, with agents doing the bricks, this is the lesson that matters.

Read more →

Stop Installing AI Tools

Vercel got breached through Context.ai, an AI tool an employee installed with OAuth scopes into Google Workspace. It's the latest in a pattern: Trivy into litellm, axios maintainer hijack, now this. The safest AI tool is the one you didn't install.

Read more →
Featured

Benchmarks Are Bullshit

Berkeley just built an agent that games AI benchmarks. Karpathy called it months ago. The best coding model doesn't top the charts, the highest-ranked Chinese models disappoint in practice, and the entire leaderboard industry optimizes for the wrong thing.

Read more →

The Trust Tax: Anthropic's Worst Month

Anthropic silently changed Claude Code's cache TTL from 1 hour to 5 minutes, inflating costs 10-20x. Users had to reverse-engineer the binary to prove it. False child bans, $600 surprise charges, and the OpenClaw crackdown completed the picture. April 2026 was the month trust broke.

Read more →

Same Terms, Different Treatment

The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic for insisting AI shouldn't power autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. Hours later, it gave OpenAI a deal with weaker guardrails dressed up as the same thing. From a developer who ships with Claude daily.

Read more →