From Doing, to Checking, to Checking the Check
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October 14, 2026
The field of mathematics is in turmoil, thanks to AI. As the field advanced, one of the techniques mathematicians leveraged to be certain that a proof is correct is to have a machine check it. But it did not come for free. Hales and Ferguson announced the Kepler proof in 1998 but the machine-checked
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Tags: Agentic AI, Business Strategy, Management
Coherence, on One Page
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October 08, 2026
Newsletter – Edition 11 The date is set. Coherence: The Competitive Advantage AI Can’t Buy launches November 17 on Amazon. The manuscript is written, the interior is typeset, and the book is in its final proofreading pass. It is almost an object you can hold. Before the launch details at
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Tags: Agentic AI, Business Strategy, Management
Coherence, the Music Video
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October 04, 2026
I was inspired by Ethan Mollick’s AI-generated music video explainer of the bitter lesson to make my own explainer video of Coherence. Fable suggested a sea shanty genre and wrote the lyrics. I used Suno to generate the audio and Fable completed the rest. Enjoy!
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Tags: Agentic AI, Business Strategy, Management
Where the Bitter Lesson Stops
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October 04, 2026
In 2019, computer scientist and Turing Award winner Richard Sutton wrote what his biggest lesson was from 70 years of AI research. The bitter lesson, as he called it, is that methods that use more computation keep outperforming methods that are built on how humans solve the problem. He gave several
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Tags: Agentic AI, Business Strategy, Management
A New Car for Sixty-Nine Dollars?
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September 29, 2026
Newsletter – Edition 10 Greetings from Southern California, where I am at the Gartner Global CISO Executive Summit. One evening in, and the conversations with security leaders have already been worth the trip. It follows a recent visit to the CIO Fellows Society forum in Plano. Two rooms full
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Tags: Agentic AI, Business Strategy, Management
220% More Code, 40% More Incidents
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September 21, 2026
The Wall Street Journal reported in late July that corporate America was pulling back on AI token spending. “Tokenmaxxing” had a scoreboard that measured spend. Nobody kept track of what it cost to absorb. Meta ran the experiment at large scale, alongside a restructuring plan it called “Projec
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Tags: Agentic AI, Business Strategy, Management
Machines Organized Themselves. OpenAI’s People Couldn’t.
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September 21, 2026
On June 2, the moderator of DseWiki, a decades-old wiki for German software developers, noticed the site’s pages had been overwritten with lists of links, and reverted them. The site, which had averaged two edits each year, saw a flood of edits two weeks later, on June 16th. At its peak, the mod
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A Cover, and a Map
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September 16, 2026
Newsletter – Edition 9 The book has a cover now, and it is live on the site: Coherence. It is a strange relief to watch the argument transform from a manuscript draft to an object with a face. Scattered strokes in the dark, only visible under a single light overhead, and the scatter settles in
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A New Kind of Debt
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September 10, 2026
Newsletter – Edition 8 Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. This is a quote from 1992 by a programmer named Ward Cunningham. He was trying to explain how one can take shortcuts while writing softw
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“AI Doesn’t Matter”: Beyond the J-Curve
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September 01, 2026
Newsletter – Edition 7 Essential to competitiveness but inconsequential to strategic advantage: that’s why IT is best viewed (and managed) as a commodity. This is a quote from Nicholas Carr more than twenty years ago about IT in enterprises. And the quote still works today if you read IT as
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The Subtitle Gets a Second Act
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August 10, 2026
Newsletter – Edition 4 A quick update on the book. It is in design, and the cover is coming together. I am going back and forth with the publisher’s design team, so nothing is final yet. When the cover is ready, you will see it here first. Which brings me to a favor. In Edition […]
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The Machinery Under Manners
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August 09, 2026
Reid Hoffman posted this week about how to make an introduction. His rule is the double opt-in. Before connecting two people, you check with both of them first. You ask each whether they want the intro, and you make it only when both say yes. He makes the case well. Every introduction is a bet [R
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Coding Got Easy, But What Kind?
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August 09, 2026
A programmer named Senko Rašić published an angry post this week. He is angry at a slogan going around: “code was never the hard part.” He calls it an insult to programmers. The post hit Hacker News and Lobsters and drew more than five hundred comments. Reading the comments, I noticed
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Uninformed Expectations, Five Years Later
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August 09, 2026
I named the roadblock to AI ROI back in 2021. It still exists but at a different place.
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The Whole Book In Fifteen Sentences
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August 04, 2026
Newsletter – Edition 3 A quick milestone. Copy-editing on the book is finished, and it has moved into design. The words are settled. Now it becomes an object you can hold. Copy-editing is the pass where someone reads the manuscript line by line and fixes the grammar, punctuation, and consisten
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Could a Machine Have Had Darwin’s Idea?
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August 02, 2026
In November 2020 I started a thread on X. I have barely used the platform these past couple of years, and I only came back to this thread recently, by accident, when some of my own old posts surfaced in front of me. Reading them in one sitting was strange, because a thread I had […]
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Can Frontier AI Outdo MBAs?
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August 02, 2026
Three of the top business schools in the country just tested frontier AI on the analytical work their MBAs are trained to do, and the models scored in the high eighties. If you run a company, that number is coming for you soon, probably in a deck that recommends cutting a layer of analysts. So [R
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Sensing Is More Than Measurement
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August 02, 2026
The Financial Times reported this week on an internal Amazon presentation held July 28. Engineers walked staff through a set of AI cost overruns. The largest used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet to match author details against product listings on Amazon’s retail site. It ran 860 percent over b
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Why Ford Rehired
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August 02, 2026
Ford has added more than 350 experienced engineers over the past three years after its automated quality systems failed to deliver the results the company expected. Inside Ford they are called gray beards. Some are former Ford employees. Others came from suppliers. Ford says it added the specialists
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Early Signs of Rehiring
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July 27, 2026
A short update to an earlier post on the AI jobs debate. A few weeks ago I argued that the AI jobs debate was asking the wrong question. My point was that the layoffs of the past year were mostly a bet, not a result. Companies were cutting in anticipation of what AI would let […]
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Coherence: The Competitive Advantage AI Can't Buy
