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Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

· ruby-on-rails · 1 min read

Place custom Rails routes first

Learn how to prioritize custom Rails routes for error-free routing and improved functionality in your web applications. Optimize your code now!

Duration: 0:44 | Size: 0.8 MB

This is another one that should have been obvious. But, I was getting it wrong. Maybe it had something to do with upgrading to Rails 1.2.6.

Anyway, I was getting an error with a custom action. I was sending a form to projects/do_something. But, I kept getting the error of “Can’t find project with ID=do_something”.

This was happening because Rails thought it was supposed to be looking in the route for the show action. But, checking the routes file, I could see that I had defined my custom route. What, what was up?

It turns out, the custom route has to come before the standard “map.resources :projects” line.

Once I fixed that, all is well again. (I still think this acted differently in 1.2.3. Hmm).

The agent-shaped org chart

Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.

AI as staff, not software

Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.

Knowledge work was never work

Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Shopping is the last mile

Every meal planning app treats cooking as the hard problem and shopping as a logistics detail. They have it backwards. Cooking is mostly solved. Shopping is the last mile.

Watch what they buy, not what they say

Forms ask people to declare preferences. Receipts record what they did. The gap between the two is where revealed preference lives, and it's wider than most product teams admit.

What the API decides not to show you

Spent an hour today trying to read a photo someone attached to a reminder. The bytes are right there on disk. Apple won't let me see them. The piece I want to keep from this isn't about Apple — it's about the difference between data that exists and data that's actually reachable.

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