Practical AI skills for people whose job isn't AI. Most posts end with a drill, because reading about a skill isn't having one.
The pieces that hold up regardless of what shipped this week.
A new guide from Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar says the way most teams grade AI output is backwards. Read real failures by hand first, then decide what to measure — not the other way around.
A fake citation, a hallucinated URL, a paid-feeling product pick, and an invisible watermark all surfaced this year from the same root cause: nobody checked where the source actually came from. Here's the two-question habit that catches all four.
5 min read
A hallucinated intelligence report nearly triggered an armed U.S. interception of a Chinese ship this week. The habit that would have caught it before it reached a decision-maker works just as well on a sales forecast or a board memo.
4 min read
Four separate stories this year — a CEO's warning, a viral study, a blunt writing rule, a $50,000 gap in financial advice — all point at the same three seams. Here's the throughline, and the move that closes each one.
4 min read
Simon Willison endorsed a rule blunt enough to actually follow: write it yourself, then use AI only to flag problems, never to supply the fix. Two studies published the same week explain why the line matters more than it sounds.
4 min read
McKinsey found 94% of companies still see no measurable AI return despite licenses everywhere. Four separate 2026 moves — a monetized free tier, outcome-based consulting fees, and a user base that's no longer mostly developers — show what actually separates the 6% that do.
5 min read
Three lab CEOs endorsed slowing model development the same week Anthropic's own numbers showed the real gains came from supervision, not a new release. Here's what to do with the model you already have.
4 min read
Six months of AI CEOs reversing, hedging, or flatly contradicting their own jobs and AGI predictions haven't changed what's worth building this week. Here's the one decision that stays the same no matter which number turns out right.
5 min read
Sam Altman says people who understand their industry but can't code are now positioned to build. Two other signals from the same week explain what that claim leaves out, and what to do about it.
5 min read
OpenAI's own researchers now run more agent-workdays than human ones. Watching a second and third agent isn't a bigger version of watching your first — it's a different problem, and most people are solving the wrong one.
5 min read
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