AI

Agents do not answer questions for humans. They take action in other systems on their own.

The writing on AI examines what must change when intelligence acts without a human in the loop.

Jun 2026essay You can't print this one on a t-shirt The US barred foreign access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5, an export control that reads less like security than punishment for refusing the Pentagon.

Jun 2026essay Who decides which agents get to transact? Mastercard and Visa announced agent credentialing systems on the same day. The claim underneath: the right to decide which AI agents can act in commerce.

Jun 2026essay Apple rented the brain Apple just handed Google the intelligence layer of 2.2 billion devices, and the contract clause protecting users costs Google almost nothing.

Jun 2026essay Inference got 430× cheaper. Your agent didn't. Inference got 430x cheaper per token, but agents burn 100x more of them. Real savings on agentic workloads is 4.3x, not 430x. Why the curves diverge.

Jun 2026essay Compute is an energy business. Bitcoin miners knew first. The binding constraint on AI isn't chips—it's power. The Bitcoin miners who survived the 2024 halving already own the grid-connected megawatts.

May 2026essay The cost of intelligence just hit zero AI inference prices fell 1000x in three years. Open-weight models like DeepSeek and Kimi mean the floor stays low permanently.

Apr 2026essay Every agent in production is a stranger The internet's trust mechanisms all trace back to a human who can be held responsible. Agents remove the human. The infrastructure was not designed for that.

Apr 2026essay The catalog isn't the market Registries indexed 100,000+ agents. Developers still use Google to find MCP servers. The catalog problem got solved. The discovery problem didn't.

Apr 2026essay The limit isn't reasoning. It's reach. Agent connections are still hand-built. The pieces to fix that exist—but nobody's assembled them yet.

Mar 2026essay The CLI is the new API SaaS companies are shipping CLIs built for agents, not developers. The CLI is the new line between connected and irrelevant.

Mar 2026essay The real tokenomics The seat was both the pricing unit and the moat. When agents do the work, both collapse. Companies that haven't moved are watching their multiples compress.

Mar 2026essay Too big to fail, again AI concentration risk mirrors too big to fail banking. When OpenAI or Anthropic go down, companies that replaced staff with AI pipelines lose all capacity.

Mar 2026essay Agents need computers, not compute AI agents need persistent environments, not ephemeral compute. The cloud abstracted away the machine—agents are buying it back.

Mar 2026essay Agent-era infrastructure Every layer of internet infrastructure assumed a human user. Agents break that assumption across compute, discovery, identity, and payments.

Mar 2026essay Agent payments have a three-body problem Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal shipped agent payment products. Read the fine print and it's the same system with an agent-shaped UI. The real battle is political.

Feb 2026note Nothing enforces your agent's rules Agent skills carry rules with no enforcement underneath. The skill layer is a trust layer—you write the instructions, the model reads them, and you hope.

Feb 2026note I know Kung Fu A SKILL.md file turns an agent into a specialist instantly—no training run, no fine-tuning. Skills are distribution channels, and the authors are the new buyers.

Feb 2026note Nobody knows how to price for agents The SaaS debate isn't proprietary AI vs. open. It's that neither path offers a pricing model that works.

Feb 2026note SOUL.md and MEMORY.md are the new hearts and minds Agent-driven discovery replaces ad-driven attention. Products must be legible to SOUL.md and memorable to MEMORY.md—you can't buy placement in either file.

Feb 2026note AI changed what a product is AI agents and open protocols broke the assumption that products have edges, with consequences for positioning, pricing, and competitive dynamics.

Oct 2025note AWS is the Achilles' heel of surveillance tech AWS outages highlight centralization risks. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and Nostr carry on unimpeded.