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.
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
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
Practical AI skills, sent when there's something genuinely useful to share. No filler, no hype.
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