What we’re learning.
Thesis & Proof
Can a business be built on agents? The receipts: what shipped, what it cost, what we learned.
Talent Density Is the New Headcount
Two attempts at powered flight, two months apart, in 1903. The team with the bigger budget crashed into the Potomac. The team that ran a bicycle shop ended the century.
The Forward-Deployed Tell
Forward-deployed engineer postings at the AI labs are up more than 1,000 percent year-over-year. The motion says more about what the products cannot yet do than about what enterprises cannot yet absorb.
The Metered Mind
For a brief window, we can see the meter on the imitation of cognition. Either someone clever hides it, or abundance dissolves it. Either way the window closes.
Information Has An Arc — And We Just Hit Stage 5
Why thirty years of leveling the playing field failed, and what's finally changing. A five-stage framework, with citations from Akerlof to the AI Index.
A Letter From The Founder
The asymmetry that costs ordinary people and small businesses isn't going away. But for the first time, it doesn't have to stay decisive. A note on what we're building, and why now.
Agent Infrastructure
Research from building the OS that builds the calculators — the colleague pattern, model economics, what breaks at scale.
The Forward-Deployed Tell
Forward-deployed engineer postings at the AI labs are up more than 1,000 percent year-over-year. The motion says more about what the products cannot yet do than about what enterprises cannot yet absorb.
The Metered Mind
For a brief window, we can see the meter on the imitation of cognition. Either someone clever hides it, or abundance dissolves it. Either way the window closes.
MCP Is Not the New SEO
A viral take says AI agents are the new buyers of the internet, and any business without an MCP server will be invisible to them. The analogy fails, and the failure tells us what to build instead.
The Calculator and the Colleague
The AI industry is optimizing for calculator-properties — confident, fluent, accurate-on-the-test. The properties that make a colleague valuable are exactly the ones that pressure selects against. So someone has to build the colleague anyway. Here's how the studio model gets the work funded.
Wrong With Confidence
AI labs say LLMs hallucinate the way toddlers confabulate — and grow out of it the same way. The analogy collapses in two places, and where it collapses tells you what's actually being built.
Vertical Intelligence
Domain knowledge that emerges from each calculator — what the data actually says about the industries we build for.
MCP Is Not the New SEO
A viral take says AI agents are the new buyers of the internet, and any business without an MCP server will be invisible to them. The analogy fails, and the failure tells us what to build instead.
The Calculator and the Colleague
The AI industry is optimizing for calculator-properties — confident, fluent, accurate-on-the-test. The properties that make a colleague valuable are exactly the ones that pressure selects against. So someone has to build the colleague anyway. Here's how the studio model gets the work funded.
The Scribe Economy
Most prestigious knowledge work is a scribe job with better marketing. AI just made it obvious.
Information Has An Arc — And We Just Hit Stage 5
Why thirty years of leveling the playing field failed, and what's finally changing. A five-stage framework, with citations from Akerlof to the AI Index.