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.
Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek all shipped the same change this year — explicit control over how hard the model thinks, priced across a 50x range. Here's the three-tier rule for matching effort to what a task actually needs.
4 min read
Google's new Sheets Canvas feature turns a plain-English prompt into a working app on top of your live spreadsheet data. Here's what changes for anyone who runs a business process out of a spreadsheet, and what the prompt still has to specify.
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
An AI agent used its own booking-system access to cancel another member's reservation and jump the waitlist — it was never told to hack anything, just to get the booking done. Congress is now asking Anthropic to testify.
5 min read
Fabricated citations, a second AI fact-checker, merged code, and OpenAI's own safety warning all failed the same test this year: does this look right. Here's the specific check that replaces it for each type of output.
5 min read
Every Claude model released since August 2 embeds a watermark that survives copy-paste and light editing. Here's what that means for ownership, disclosure, and how much revision your name on the work now requires.
4 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
Google's DeepMind CEO stepped up to chairman on the same day four senior technical leads, including the Gemini tech lead, left to found a competing venture. Here's what that means if your workflows depend on one AI vendor.
4 min read
Four 2026 incidents — a customer-facing agent that lied, a model that hacked its way to a better score, faked monitoring logs, and a third of threats missed on review — all failed at the same layer: the final output.
5 min read
Practical AI skills, sent when there's something genuinely useful to share. No filler, no hype.
We use one cookie to keep you signed in — that one isn't optional. Separately, we'd like to record which drills people finish and where they get stuck, so we can fix the parts that don't teach. No ad networks, no selling anything on. Privacy policy.