24 posts across Directing AI, Systems & Adoption, Judging AI
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 readMcKinsey 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 readA resume screener, a one-shot game, a benchmark leader, and a search engine all optimized for something measurable this year — and it wasn't whether the output was actually right for the job. Here's the check that catches the gap before you act on the score.
5 min readTwo studies published the same week found AI search tools steering people toward worse choices: pricier products from Google's AI Mode, fabricated citations from Perplexity.
3 min readClaude's creative connectors, ChatGPT's custom instructions, and GPT-5.5's shorter answers all expanded how much you can tell an AI tool before you start. The upgrade only pays off if you fill the room.
4 min readClaude, Gemini, and DeepSeek all shipped the same change this year — explicit control over how hard the model thinks, priced across a 50x range. Here's the three-tier rule for matching effort to what a task actually needs.
4 min readFabricated citations, a second AI fact-checker, merged code, and OpenAI's own safety warning all failed the same test this year: does this look right. Here's the specific check that replaces it for each type of output.
5 min readAn AI agent one-shot a working game and a NeurIPS-ready research paper. Both got rejected for the same reason: strong execution, wrong call on what to build.
5 min readFour separate AI stories from this year — a 40% task failure rate, three experts agreeing independently, a Hacker News revolt, and an executive hype backlash — all point at the same skill gap, and none of them is really about the AI.
5 min readMIT Sloan tested AI-generated financial advice against real outcomes and found the quality of the prompt, not the model, decided who ended up ahead. Here's the structure that closes the gap.
4 min readThree communities — corporate critics, cognitive scientists, and content readers — arrived at the same conclusion this week: uncritical AI use is producing bad decisions, eroding judgment, and generating detectable slop. Here's what to do about it.
4 min readOpenAI's own safety guidance for ChatGPT Work admits the system can produce 'finished mistakes at a scale that is harder to catch.' The same week, Wharton research killed prompt tricks and Cursor data showed a 46x productivity gap. The differentiator is now verification, not prompting.
6 min readMcKinsey reports 30%+ of its consulting fees are now tied to client outcomes, not hours. Deloitte warns labour-based consulting could shrink significantly by 2035. Here's what the shift from hours to outcomes means for every professional who sells time.
5 min readMost of the effort in reviewing AI output goes on working out what you wanted while looking at what you got. Three sentences written beforehand turns a judgement into a comparison.
5 min readFigma's CEO Dylan Field told Stratechery that AI output 'draws from the middle of the distribution' — and that teams become viscerally attached to their first concept. The iterate-and-refine skill is what separates competent AI output from distinctive work.
4 min readEthan Mollick, Charity Majors, and Simon Willison reached the same conclusion independently within five days. The professionals who get the most from AI are not the best prompters — they are the best judges.
5 min readThree AI failure modes got named publicly in the same week — forwarding raw AI answers without reading them, optimising for speed over quality, and letting the model think while you sign off on the result. Each one has a skill that fixes it.
5 min readTwo Hacker News posts hit the front page the same week with a combined 1,374 points. One named the upstream problem — vague briefs going in. One named the downstream problem — raw output going out. The model was fine in both cases.
4 min readReading it and approving it isn't a review — it's the exact filter AI output is best at passing. Interrogating is a different activity, it takes about ninety seconds, and it's most of what separates the people getting value from AI.
5 min readA New York Times reporter used AI to research a story, got back a fabricated quote, and published it. A reader caught it. The editors didn't. The failure pattern here isn't a journalism problem — it's the default behavior for anyone who uses AI to pull quotes, stats, or summaries and publishes them without checking the source.
5 min readFigures are the highest-risk thing AI produces and the thing people check least, because a number looks like a fact. Four checks that take under a minute each, and the one that catches the most.
5 min readGoogle's Gemini can now output a finished Word file, spreadsheet, or PDF directly from conversation. Writing prompts that produce share-ready documents is a different skill than writing prompts that produce text.
4 min readCheck everything and you've saved nothing. Check nothing and you're gambling. The right amount is a function of two things, and neither of them is how much you trust the tool.
5 min readA law firm sent 42 fabricated citations to a judge. A newspaper published a quote that was never said. In every case the output looked right, because looking right is what these systems are reliably good at.
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