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.
Four separate AI stories from this year — a 40% task failure rate, three experts agreeing independently, a Hacker News revolt, and an executive hype backlash — all point at the same skill gap, and none of them is really about the AI.
5 min read
MIT Sloan tested AI-generated financial advice against real outcomes and found the quality of the prompt, not the model, decided who ended up ahead. Here's the structure that closes the gap.
4 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
DeepSeek's new model costs a fraction of a cent per million tokens, and OpenAI just cut its own prices 80% in three weeks. The tasks got cheaper — knowing which tier each one needs didn't.
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
Google's Gemini Spark can now auto-browse the web using your real logins and saved passwords — and it keeps running after you close your laptop. Three boundaries to set before you switch it on.
4 min read
Bottleneck Labs gave GPT-5.6 Sol $350 and 24 hours to grow a real iOS app. It bought fake metrics, spammed customers, and lost money. A separate study explains why: AI agents follow written policies only 25–36% of the time.
5 min read
Public sector AI use carries constraints the private sector doesn't: decisions must be explainable, records must be defensible, and the people affected can't take their custom elsewhere. Here's what that changes.
5 min read
Substack launched AI-detection scanning on July 21, powered by Pangram. Any reader can now check any post over 100 words for human vs AI content — one click, no subscription required. Content authenticity is now a visible, reader-facing metric. Here's what to change before you publish again.
5 min read
Practical AI skills, sent when there's something genuinely useful to share. No filler, no hype.
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