Blog
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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…
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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…
