Blog
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The state and the machine
What little we saw of Fable and Mythos offers both cause for excitement and concern. It was widely and credibly seen as a model of a completely different caliber from those that had come before. Perhaps the risks in this instance were overstated or amplified for political ends. What is more profound is that the short time we had with the models offered a clear glimpse of a future in which a single company is making significant progress toward a superintelligence with the potential to rival or exceed the power of nation-states or even massive corporations. That juncture was never going to ar…
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We have ways of making you pay
The true cost of AI work is hard to measure; the value of AI work is also hard to measure, and metering changes which of those two blindnesses you notice first. It drags the cost into the light, itemised and arriving monthly, while the value stays diffuse, lagging and easy to argue about. That asymmetry is exactly why the panic is showing up now, ahead of any definitive verdict on whether the spending was worth it.Simon Willison did the arithmetic on himself. He pays $200 a month across his Anthropic and OpenAI consumer plans, and when he ran the ccusage tool against his laptop, it showed $…
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Bloated: how chat made you fat
It helps to remember the time you save generating a document is not free. It is borrowed from every person who has to read it, at interest, and the longer the distribution list the worse the rate of return.The pitch for writing with a language model is that it saves you time: you describe the memo, the model produces it and 90 seconds later you have four pages (okay, maybe forty) instead of a blank document. Someone still has to read those pages though. The model did not remove that work. It just moved it downstream to your colleagues or suppliers, and on the way it produced more than any h…
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Apple’s bicycle without a chain
Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. Apple Intelligence so far is more like a bicycle with no chain. The frame is gorgeous, and the engineering is extraordinary, but you cannot get far with it.In early 2025, Xe Iaso published a piece that landed like a brick through a window in the Apple developer community. The argument was simple and damning: Apple had built the holy grail of trusted compute with Private Cloud Compute, a genuinely unprecedented piece of security infrastructure, only to fill it with half-baked notification summaries and an image generator that produce…
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Weeknotes vol. 17: business, schmizness
Hello and happy casual weeknotes Friday.I stopped writing these about a year ago when I began the transition into consulting (solving fun and challenging problems), and to say a lot has changed since then would be the understatement of the century.In summary: Iain joined full time, we’re helping people solve operational problems and optimize their work across pretty much all aspects of business, and we’re having a lot of fun doing it. Iain has his masters in AI for Business, which has pushed me to go down the biggest rabbit hole I’ve been down since HTML/CSS in college (and we know where that…
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The ten trillion dollar gamble
In November 2025, on stage at the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event, the chief financial officer of OpenAI was asked how her company planned to honor roughly $1.4 trillion in compute contracts on $13 billion of revenue. Sarah Friar said she was looking to assemble a network of banks, private equity, and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee.” By the following evening, she had posted to LinkedIn explaining that “backstop” had muddied the point, that what she meant was something more like a public-private partnership, and that the United States government has been “incredibly forward-leaning” …
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Never talk about goblins
Buried in a JSON file that OpenAI posted to GitHub recently, inside the configuration for its newest coding agent, sits an instruction that reads like a footnote written by someone losing their composure. “Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” The line appears more than once. Whoever wrote it wanted to be sure the model understood.Most readers, including ones who follow AI closely, may be unaware of what a “base instruction” is, where it lives, or why anyone a…
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Read the frickin’ manual: the end of the user interface
When a new sales rep joins a company, whilst manuals and process documents probably exist somewhere in varying degrees of obsolescence, in practice the rep just asks where the opportunity stage field lives. Someone on the team shows them. A few months in, the same rep is teaching the next hire. The institutional knowledge of how to use the CRM reproduces itself like a folk song.But agents do not pick up folk songs. They read the documentation, the tool description, the parameter schema, and whatever else has been put in front of them in machine-readable form. If a piece of operating knowledge…
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Attention is all you ever needed
For seventy years, a generation of management consultants has repeated Joseph Juran’s line about the vital few and the trivial many as though it described a permanent feature of commercial life. 20% of customers generate 80% of revenue. 20% of products account for 80% of sales. 20% of bugs cause 80% of errors, as Steve Ballmer once put it in a famous 2002 memo.This is correct as an observation. It is wrong as a permanent worldview. The skewed distributions that defined mid-twentieth-century capitalism were not the imprint of some natural law of commerce. They were what commerce looked like wh…
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The cost of everything and value of nothing
Nobody knows what a token will cost in five years. Nobody knows how many tokens a single user will burn through in a working day, or whether the word “token” will even still mean what it means now once models have been carved up, distilled, and pushed to the edge. We know roughly the shape of the spreadsheet. We have no idea what goes in the cells.We know reasoning chains are long, media is heavy, and agents loop. We know inference cost per token has been roughly halving every three months, a Moore’s Law cadence that nobody would sensibly extrapolate past 2027. We know each frontier model has…
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Go to the actual place and see the actual thing
Somewhere in a Toyota plant in the early 1950s, a young engineer stood inside a chalk circle drawn on the factory floor. Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, had put him there with a single instruction. Watch. No clipboard, no agenda, just observe what happens in front of you, and do not leave until you can tell me something I did not already know.This exercise, known as the Ohno Circle, was not a hazing ritual but the distillation of a management philosophy built on a heretical premise. You cannot fix what you have not personally witnessed breaking. Seventy years late…
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Climbing the Claude ladder: from prompting to orchestrating
Most people using Claude are stuck on the first rung of a very tall ladder. They open a chat, type a question, get an answer, and move on with their day. Which is fine, but it’s a bit like buying a full workshop and only using the tape measure.I’ve spent the better part of a year climbing this ladder at Better Than Good, and the difference between the bottom and the top is not incremental. It’s the difference between asking for directions and building the road.Here’s how the progression works, what changes at each level, and why most people plateau long before they should.PromptingEveryone st…
