Philosopher at Large

Knowledge work was never work

Why do we have PowerPoints? The prior question nobody's asking.

The accommodation tax

Every time I ask an AI agent for a change, I still cringe.

I ran my AI agency's first real engagement. Here's everything that happened.

Five AI personas. One client onboarding. Fifteen minutes of things going wrong in instructive ways.

AI and the Götterdämmerung of Work

AI didn't defeat the myth that human value comes from reliable output — we built the systems that exposed it.

Your project management tool was made for a non-human (AI) factory, not for you

Every tool on the market descends from Taylor's factory floor. The assumptions were wrong then.

Most of your infrastructure is decoration

Dashboards nobody checks. Reviews that rubber-stamp. Strategy decks that never connect to operations. How much of what you manage is ornamental?

When execution becomes cheap, ideas become expensive

The bottleneck moved from building to deciding — and most organizations haven't noticed.

Manual fluency is the prerequisite for agent supervision

You cannot responsibly automate what you cannot do manually

Your process was built for a different speed

When work changes velocity, governance becomes theater.

The work that remains

Speed without understanding is just technical debt with better commit messages.

The bottleneck moved

Execution got cheap. Nobody's ready for what that means.

Universities missed the window to own AI literacy

The window was wide open. They spent it forming committees.

You were trained to suppress yourself

Organizations engineered the machine-self. You cooperated because it worked—until now.

We always panic about new tools (and we’re always wrong)

Printing press, typewriters, photography, calculators, recorded music—every time a new tool emerges, we predict disaster. We're always wrong about what's worth protecting.

• Influence in the AI era: Why human skills still matter
• Is automation the key to organizational resilience?
• From 11ty to Hugo: Simplifying my blog stack
• Server-side dashboard architecture: Why moving data fetching off the browser changes everything
• Bookmark: What fully automated firms will look like
• AI as coach: Transforming professional and continuing education
• Bookmark: New ways to brand your product knowledge base

Files are permanent. Databases are not.

Why choosing files as your source of truth matters more than you think—and what happens when you don't.

Sometimes friction is your best friend

The pause that makes you think might be the most valuable part of the system.

Busy is not a state

Activity doesn't count. Only state change does.

When teaching stops being bounded

From scarcity to abundance

When your brilliant idea meets organizational reality: A survival guide

Is your brilliant idea being derailed by organizational inertia?