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.
Agents are the wrong shape for more tasks than the enthusiasm suggests — and for a few of them, an old-fashioned rule or a person is better. Six signals that the answer isn't an agent.
5 min read
Most 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 read
Skills decay when they go unused, and AI makes it easy to stop using several at once. That may be a fine trade — but it should be a decision, not a drift. Here's how to choose deliberately.
5 min read
The question 'what did it actually do on the eleventh?' has an answer or it doesn't, and that's decided months earlier. Five things worth recording, none of which require an engineer.
5 min read
AI's most attractive use is work you couldn't do yourself — which is exactly where you can't assess the result. There are real checks available, and they're structural rather than technical.
6 min read
Most agent failures aren't reasoning failures. They're handover failures — the agent didn't know a thing everyone in your team knows and nobody has ever typed. Here's how to find those things before they cost you.
5 min read
Almost every team that adopts AI builds a shared prompt library, and almost all of them are abandoned within a quarter. The reasons are consistent, and so is the version that survives.
5 min read
An AI agent can't tell the difference between the document you gave it and instructions hidden inside that document. That single fact explains most agent security incidents — and the defence isn't better prompts.
5 min read
An agent that took forty steps produces more evidence than anyone will read, so most people read none of it and approve anyway. Here's what to check instead, and why the middle of the run matters more than the end.
5 min read
Practical AI skills, sent when there's something genuinely useful to share. No filler, no hype.
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