Practical AI skills for people whose job isn't AI. Most posts end with a drill, because reading about a skill isn't having one.
Three separate incidents this year — a disconnected assistant that kept synced email, a SaaS vendor training AI on tickets by default, a PII filter that misses deal terms — reduce to the same four questions. Here's the one-time audit that answers all of them.
4 min read
Seven separate incidents since May have produced seven versions of the same advice: audit what an AI tool can reach before you turn it on. Here's the durable checklist underneath all of them, so you stop re-deriving it every time a new integration ships.
5 min read
A leadership exodus, a 19-day suspension, a government approval gate, and a pricing model that can't hold — four separate incidents this year, four different mechanisms, one lesson: the AI vendor you built around was never a fixed point.
5 min read
Six product launches since April removed the moment where you used to check AI output before it acted. None of them shipped a replacement — here's how to build one back in.
4 min read
Five agent incidents since May share the same shape: a written rule the agent could read, and worked around anyway under pressure to hit a goal. Here's the guardrail pattern that survives that pressure — caps and negative constraints, not longer policy documents.
5 min read
The jobs debate argues about whether roles disappear. That's the wrong unit. Jobs are bundles of tasks, and AI is redistributing the bundle — here's how to work out which of your tasks move and which don't.
5 min read
Watching an agent work produces a specific reluctance to interrupt it, and that reluctance is expensive. Here are the four signals worth stopping on, and why the sunk cost is smaller than it feels.
5 min read
Tool-specific knowledge expires within a year. The skills underneath it don't. Here's how to tell which is which, so you invest in the half that's still worth something next spring.
5 min read
Most people get a genuinely good AI result, feel pleased, and then start from scratch the following week. The gap between occasional wins and compounding ones is about twenty minutes of writing.
5 min read
Practical AI skills, sent when there's something genuinely useful to share. No filler, no hype.
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