Writing
Marginalia
Shorter notes and observations from the margin.
“I hand AI the work. I keep the judgment, and the things that can't be undone.”
What I Hand to AI
I stopped asking what AI can do, and started asking which mistakes I can afford.......
Read →“Automate the plumbing, not the judgment.”
Automating the Wrong Thing
The teams getting real ROI from AI aren't automating the exciting things. They're deleting the friction everyone tolerates.......
Read →“The skill isn't spotting a model that sounds wrong. It's distrusting one that sounds right.”
The Failures You Never See
The dangerous AI failures don't look like failures. They wear the same confident voice as the correct answers.......
Read →“An answer machine gives you an output. A thinking partner gives you a better version of your own thinking.”
Stop Using AI as a Vending Machine
The shift that changed how I use AI: bring it your confusion, not just your questions.......
Read →“Use AI to go further than you could alone. Just make sure it's still you doing the going.”
Keep Your Spark Alive
A note to myself about the part of us worth protecting while everything gets easier.......
Read →“I can't tell, before I hit enter, whether its initiative will be a gift or a mess.”
For Once, I Wasn't Annoyed
I asked for formulas and got a working calculator I never requested, and it was better than what I asked for.......
Read →“The tool didn't take over my job. It made me better at the real one.”
Ten Minutes
A tool breaks, someone's stuck, and instead of filing a ticket and waiting, I fix it with an LLM on the spot, because the real job is......
Read →“The brilliance was always human. We just stopped seeing it.”
The Answer No One Will Read
The perfect answers used to grade AI are written by hand, by experts who could out-think the model, and no one ever reads them.......
Read →“It could find the twenty-fifth person. It just couldn't notice that changed the sentence.”
Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five
The model found the expert I'd miscounted, messaged all of them, and still copied my wrong number into every line.......
Read →“We taught them to sound like us. Now we're the ones trying not to sound like them.”
The Tell
The em dash became the giveaway for AI writing, so now we pull it out of our own sentences to prove we're human.......
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