Blog
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Chaos or death
AI has made disorder cheap to create. Order still costs leadership attention and decisions, and most firms buy only the tools.I spend a lot of time in other people’s messes. That is, more or less, my job. A company calls because its technology initiative has stalled, and I always find the same scene, just in a different company. Everyone agreed on a strategy deck, and nobody followed it. Staff are using AI tools the business never chose, and Harmonic Security tracked 665 of them across the enterprises it studied in 2025. The person who commissioned it is frustrated that people aren’t follow…
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Workslop: worse but more
In November 1955, a naval historian named C. Northcote Parkinson opened a satirical essay in The Economist with a line that outlasted everything else he wrote. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. His example was an elderly lady who spent an entire day posting a single card to her niece, a task a busy person would finish in three minutes on the way to lunch.Parkinson’s law now has a sequel, and it is worse. Work no longer expands to fill the time. It expands to fill the capacity. The effort of producing a thing used to carry an implicit question, namely, whether the thi…
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Foomers vs doomers: skilled incompetence and the AI tug of war
foom-er, noun, an ironic malapropism playing on doomerism (AGI fatalists) and FOMO (hustle bros), used to describe techno-optimists. Reflects the onomatopoeic “slowly, then all at once” nature of exponential growth: “AI go foom.”A speaker at one of the many AI conferences that have sprung up like garments on your “clothes chair” (not clean, but not dirty enough to wash) describes the miracles of agent-assisted coding. Year-long rewrites finished in a fortnight, backlogs cleared, and hard problems dissolved by brilliant prompting and clever code harnesses. The audience of true believers laps i…
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Forward Deployed Engineers: AI’s hired guns
The last mile of AI deployment is a real person, sitting in your office, learning your business, writing your plumbing, and making things work reliably. That will remain human for the foreseeable future.Google Trends shows a 5,000% increase in searches for “AI forward-deployed engineer” over the past five years. The curve stays flat from 2021 through mid-2024, then turns vertical. Indeed data reported by Business Insider shows postings for the role rising from 643 in April 2025 to 5,330 a year later, a 729% increase. LinkedIn’s own study found 42-fold growth between 2023 and 2025, making fo…
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The sorting machine: recruitment’s race to the bottom
The sorting machine was built to cope with a genuine problem. Where it went wrong was in mistaking efficiency for effectiveness, in assuming that the ability to process resumes fast meant the ability to evaluate candidates well. The fix is not a smarter machine but a more modest one, paired with humans who are given the time, the tools, and the structured information to do what they were always better at.If you’ve been involved in any part of the recruitment process, the last 18 months have been dispiriting, to say the least. Hiring became a closed loop. Employers adopted applicant tracking…
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Weighing smoke: why GEO dashboards are mostly useless
The promise of a tool that gives you similar search visibility to the pre-agent world is understandably seductive. But before you eagerly hand over your cash for a platform, consider whether an afternoon’s work a month might be a more cost-effective alternative.I recently wrote about the GEO chimera, the cottage industry promising to optimise your brand into AI answers. My argument was that the levers being sold mostly did not exist. Another part of the industry is selling gauges rather than levers. Estimates of the spend on AI visibility tracking now run past $100 million a year, across hu…
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Another nice mess
Somewhere in your business right now, someone is assembling a picture that no single app can provide. It may be the project manager pulling hours from Harvest and budget data from the finance tool to assess whether the engagement is still viable. Maybe it’s you on a Sunday, because what you need is not any one number from a system, but the pattern across three of them. The cloud gave small businesses access to the best software they had ever had, priced monthly and built for specific purposes. But twenty years of sensibly chosen apps have left the average small business with a patchwork data …
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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…