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.
Google shipped desktop task automation via your phone. xAI launched a no-code voice agent builder at $0.05/minute. The tools that used to require a developer are now for everyone — which means the skills required to use them safely just became yours to learn.
6 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
A quarter of OpenAI employees now run four or more agents simultaneously each week. The people doing it most effectively are domain experts, not engineers — and as delegation grows, the risk of losing the ability to judge the output grows with it.
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
A study of 18,978 conversations found AI nearly three times more effective at fundraising than trained human canvassers — but only when unconstrained. Match the speed and length, and the advantage disappears. The practical implication for your writing workflow is not what you'd expect.
5 min read
AI is fast at gathering and structuring, and unreliable at the judgement that makes a recommendation worth acting on. Here's how strategists use it without ending up with a well-argued case for the obvious answer.
4 min read
Figma'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 read
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have their best models gated by government approval — not pricing tiers, not waitlists. If you built workflows around those models, here are three things to do before it happens again.
5 min read
Ford rehired 350 engineers after AI quality inspection produced billions in costs. The same week, a Munich court ruled AI-generated false claims are the deploying organisation's own speech. The gap between 'the AI made an error' and 'you submitted it' is closing.
5 min read
Practical AI skills, sent when there's something genuinely useful to share. No filler, no hype.
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