14 posts across Judging AI, Systems & Adoption, Directing AI
Three communities — corporate critics, cognitive scientists, and content readers — arrived at the same conclusion this week: uncritical AI use is producing bad decisions, eroding judgment, and generating detectable slop. Here's what to do about it.
4 min readOpenAI's own safety guidance for ChatGPT Work admits the system can produce 'finished mistakes at a scale that is harder to catch.' The same week, Wharton research killed prompt tricks and Cursor data showed a 46x productivity gap. The differentiator is now verification, not prompting.
6 min readMcKinsey reports 30%+ of its consulting fees are now tied to client outcomes, not hours. Deloitte warns labour-based consulting could shrink significantly by 2035. Here's what the shift from hours to outcomes means for every professional who sells time.
5 min readMost of the effort in reviewing AI output goes on working out what you wanted while looking at what you got. Three sentences written beforehand turns a judgement into a comparison.
5 min readFigma's CEO Dylan Field told Stratechery that AI output 'draws from the middle of the distribution' — and that teams become viscerally attached to their first concept. The iterate-and-refine skill is what separates competent AI output from distinctive work.
4 min readEthan Mollick, Charity Majors, and Simon Willison reached the same conclusion independently within five days. The professionals who get the most from AI are not the best prompters — they are the best judges.
5 min readThree AI failure modes got named publicly in the same week — forwarding raw AI answers without reading them, optimising for speed over quality, and letting the model think while you sign off on the result. Each one has a skill that fixes it.
5 min readTwo Hacker News posts hit the front page the same week with a combined 1,374 points. One named the upstream problem — vague briefs going in. One named the downstream problem — raw output going out. The model was fine in both cases.
4 min readReading it and approving it isn't a review — it's the exact filter AI output is best at passing. Interrogating is a different activity, it takes about ninety seconds, and it's most of what separates the people getting value from AI.
5 min readA New York Times reporter used AI to research a story, got back a fabricated quote, and published it. A reader caught it. The editors didn't. The failure pattern here isn't a journalism problem — it's the default behavior for anyone who uses AI to pull quotes, stats, or summaries and publishes them without checking the source.
5 min readFigures are the highest-risk thing AI produces and the thing people check least, because a number looks like a fact. Four checks that take under a minute each, and the one that catches the most.
5 min readGoogle's Gemini can now output a finished Word file, spreadsheet, or PDF directly from conversation. Writing prompts that produce share-ready documents is a different skill than writing prompts that produce text.
4 min readCheck everything and you've saved nothing. Check nothing and you're gambling. The right amount is a function of two things, and neither of them is how much you trust the tool.
5 min readA law firm sent 42 fabricated citations to a judge. A newspaper published a quote that was never said. In every case the output looked right, because looking right is what these systems are reliably good at.
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