Think.
Whitepapers, essays, and notes from the firm. Grouped by track: what the work is about, not when it shipped.
Thesis & Proof
Can a business be built on agents? The receipts: what shipped, what it cost, what we learned.
Measured, Not Narrated
Every AI transformation has a story. Almost none has a number. Two metrics per workflow — north star and guardrail — separate a program from a performance.
Capability Shipped. Governance Didn't.
Getting a model to write your production code is a solved problem. Trusting it enough to ship is not — and almost no one has built the machine that closes the gap.
Why AI Agents Fail in Production
Most AI agents do not fail in the demo. They fail weeks later, in production, on an input no one scripted. The recurring failure modes — confidently wrong, tool misuse, silent degradation, no observability — are a measurement and gating problem, not a model problem.
The Picker Is a Confession
A model picker is not a feature — it is the product admitting it could not decide which model your question deserved, so it made that your job. Routing is the work, not the menu.
Before the Books Could Be Trusted
The literature on the AI productivity gap is measuring the wrong constraint. The cost that hasn't fallen is verification. Until it does, the gradient widens — and whoever closes it captures the vertical.
Talent Density Is the New Headcount
Two attempts at powered flight, two months apart, in 1903. The team with the bigger budget crashed into the Potomac. The team that ran a bicycle shop ended the century.
The Forward-Deployed Tell
Forward-deployed engineer postings at the AI labs are up more than 1,000 percent year-over-year. The motion says more about what the products cannot yet do than about what enterprises cannot yet absorb.
The Metered Mind
For a brief window, we can see the meter on the imitation of cognition. Either someone clever hides it, or abundance dissolves it. Either way the window closes.
Information Has An Arc — And We Just Hit Stage 5
Why thirty years of leveling the playing field failed, and what's finally changing. A five-stage framework, with citations from Akerlof to the AI Index.
A Letter From The Founder
The asymmetry that costs ordinary people and small businesses isn't going away. But for the first time, it doesn't have to stay decisive. A note on what we're building, and why now.
Agent Infrastructure
Research from building the OS that builds the calculators — the colleague pattern, model economics, what breaks at scale.
Measured, Not Narrated
Every AI transformation has a story. Almost none has a number. Two metrics per workflow — north star and guardrail — separate a program from a performance.
Capability Shipped. Governance Didn't.
Getting a model to write your production code is a solved problem. Trusting it enough to ship is not — and almost no one has built the machine that closes the gap.
Why AI Agents Fail in Production
Most AI agents do not fail in the demo. They fail weeks later, in production, on an input no one scripted. The recurring failure modes — confidently wrong, tool misuse, silent degradation, no observability — are a measurement and gating problem, not a model problem.
The Forward-Deployed Tell
Forward-deployed engineer postings at the AI labs are up more than 1,000 percent year-over-year. The motion says more about what the products cannot yet do than about what enterprises cannot yet absorb.
The Metered Mind
For a brief window, we can see the meter on the imitation of cognition. Either someone clever hides it, or abundance dissolves it. Either way the window closes.
MCP Is Not the New SEO
A viral take says AI agents are the new buyers of the internet, and any business without an MCP server will be invisible to them. The analogy fails, and the failure tells us what to build instead.
The Calculator and the Colleague
The AI industry is optimizing for calculator-properties — confident, fluent, accurate-on-the-test. The properties that make a colleague valuable are exactly the ones that pressure selects against. So someone has to build the colleague anyway. Here's how the studio model gets the work funded.
Wrong With Confidence
AI labs say LLMs hallucinate the way toddlers confabulate — and grow out of it the same way. The analogy collapses in two places, and where it collapses tells you what's actually being built.
Vertical Intelligence
Domain knowledge that emerges from each calculator — what the data actually says about the industries we build for.
The Most Under-Tooled CEO in America
The club coach runs a seven-figure operation on group chats and gut — in a market where the families funding everything know the least.
MCP Is Not the New SEO
A viral take says AI agents are the new buyers of the internet, and any business without an MCP server will be invisible to them. The analogy fails, and the failure tells us what to build instead.
The Calculator and the Colleague
The AI industry is optimizing for calculator-properties — confident, fluent, accurate-on-the-test. The properties that make a colleague valuable are exactly the ones that pressure selects against. So someone has to build the colleague anyway. Here's how the studio model gets the work funded.
The Scribe Economy
Most prestigious knowledge work is a scribe job with better marketing. AI just made it obvious.
Information Has An Arc — And We Just Hit Stage 5
Why thirty years of leveling the playing field failed, and what's finally changing. A five-stage framework, with citations from Akerlof to the AI Index.