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Engineering, AI, & Cognition

Articles

Essays and research on building dependable AI systems, evaluating retrieval and model choices, and understanding AI’s consequences for attention, work, and society. Explore the focused reading paths for agentic engineering, RAG research, or AI, cognition, and society.

Jump to the complete archive


Complete archive

Every published canonical article, including the featured reading above, in reverse chronological order.

  1. AI, cognition, and society

    Amdahl’s Law: The Intelligence Explosion Will Branch

    Recursive self-improvement does not guarantee a permanent AI monopoly. Intelligence gains expose new bottlenecks and branch into domain-specific loops governed by evaluators, infrastructure, institutions, and power.

  2. AI, cognition, and society

    What Freedom Is For

    AI may make leisure abundant, but it cannot make leisure good. The central challenge is developing the agency, habits, and leisure literacy needed to turn spare time into a life well lived.

  3. AI, cognition, and society

    AI After the Outrage Machine

    AI can become a social technology of proportion rather than capture by restoring context, mediating disagreement, and returning people to real relationships instead of optimizing outrage and synthetic company.

  4. Agentic engineering

    The 90 Percent Problem of Agentic Software Delivery

    Faster code generation does not transform delivery by itself. Agentic software engineering creates leverage when context, risk, evidence, and trust move continuously from intent through release.

  5. AI, cognition, and society

    Attention Is Fundamental

    Attention is the first allocation system behind leadership, markets, platforms, and AI: what people and institutions repeatedly make impossible to ignore becomes the world they inhabit.

  6. Agentic engineering

    The Market for Portable Minds

    Productive intelligence should remain portable as AI enters work: workers carry generalized context, companies protect specialized context, and mobility is negotiated rather than absorbed into one central brain.

  7. AI, cognition, and society

    Medicine’s Dead Time

    Delay is itself a form of harm in lethal disease. Real-time trials, continuous monitoring, and human-relevant evidence systems expose how much medical caution is science and how much is avoidable latency.

  8. Agentic engineering

    Your Company’s AI Rollout Is Not Your Career Plan

    A company-approved AI seat provides access, not mastery. Engineers build durable advantage through a private practice of comparative tools, real repetitions, and portable judgment.

  9. Agentic engineering

    The Companies That OODA Faster

    Competitive advantage comes from OODA velocity: continuously observing, orienting, deciding, and acting through governed agents and durable organizational context rather than isolated copilots.

  10. AI, cognition, and society

    Roko’s Symbiotic Carrot

    A co-evolutionary alternative to Roko’s Basilisk in which humans and AI strengthen the civilizational competence that supports both, replacing coercive doom with reciprocal investment.

  11. Agentic engineering

    Why Office Agents Shouldn’t Live in a Shell

    Shells, files, and folders are poor primitives for knowledge work. Enterprise agents need governed semantic layers that represent people, conversations, commitments, permissions, and institutional memory directly.

  12. Agentic engineering

    Bring Your Own AI, Bring Your Own Leverage

    Engineers can build portable AI judgment and workflows without crossing the boundary between transferable personal capability and company-owned data, systems, or intellectual property.

  13. Agentic engineering

    The Vibe Trap: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

    Vibe coding accelerates prototypes but becomes a scaling trap when software matters. Agentic engineering replaces casual prompting with disciplined delegation, context, verification, and operational ownership.