Writing
The archive
Long-form analyses about where value migrates as the layer underneath commoditises. Investments, AI systems, knowledge architecture, durable design.
Latest
Your AI Agent Stack Is Solving The Wrong Problem
The real setup is not MCP servers, skills, memory files, and subagents. It is the contract stack that decides what an agent may know, do, prove, escalate, and lose.
All posts
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The Engine Underneath Hard Decisions
Eight stages turn hidden structure into durable knowledge. Most teams run three of them and call it understanding. The other five are where compounding hides.
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The Five Laws of Durable Systems
What still has a job after the change? Five tests for seeing what is likely to survive.
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The SpaceX IPO Is Not What You Think You're Buying
The filing will not just price rockets. It will reveal which layer public investors actually own.
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AI Made You Faster. It Did Not Make You Safer.
The strange thing about the AI productivity boom is that the people getting faster are not always getting more secure. Speed is becoming the surface. Proof is moving somewhere else.
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The 90-Day Canopy Audit
A roadmap can look productive while most of the work is easy to displace. Run the Substrate Map on the last 90 days and force the next planning decision to change.
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Start Here: What Survives When The Surface Changes?
A short front door to the publication: the lens, the reader paths, and the free instruments for making better judgement usable.
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The Lens Lexicon
A free two-page reference card defining the ten load-bearing terms behind the durability lens, with tests, examples, and common confusions.
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Most Verification Is Just Bigger Classification
A confidence score is not evidence. If your eval cannot produce a replayable artefact, it will fail the moment the system can respond to being measured.
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The Displacement Rate Audit
A five-minute scoring tool for any product, position, architecture, business model, or career bet. Find out what still works after the environment changes.
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The Substrate Map
A free one-page taxonomy and 10-minute exercise for finding the substrate-vs-canopy ratio in your last 90 days of work.
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PLTR: The AI Stock That Has To Prove It Owns The Permission Layer
A bull/bear thesis for Palantir: not whether AI demand is real, but whether Palantir owns the permission layer between model capability and real-world action.
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Right Company, Wrong Vector
A pick is a number. A position is a vector. The post-mortem language we have only knows how to blame the company.
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The Investor's Substrate Test
Score the substrate beneath any single position in seven minutes. A 5-axis profile and a 0-10 score for any holding. Free.
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The Forest Floor Is The Product
Most people are optimising for canopy. The work that survives the next five AI releases is built from the forest floor up.
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You're Not Comparing Models. You're Comparing Contracts.
Agent benchmarks don't measure models. They measure contracts. Two teams running the same model can publish different scores, and both can be honest.
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Prompting Isn't Writing, It's Compilation
If you treat the prompt as a spec and the model as a renderer, quality stops coming from more words and starts coming from better constraints.
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The Model Is Not the Moat
If frontier capability keeps centralising, the durable edge shifts outward into trust, workflow fit, and the surrounding package.
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I Read 3,000 Papers Across 12 Fields. Five Patterns Kept Appearing.
Every field discovers them independently. Nobody connects them.
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Is This Difficulty Load-Bearing?
Before you automate anything, ask what the friction was actually doing.