Practical AI
32 essays
My AI Maturity Ladder: From Chat to Choreography
Six rungs from chat to choreography — and why results feel inconsistent at rung three.
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Prompting Is Not the Endgame of AI
Prompting is asking better questions. Choreography is designing how intelligence moves.
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AI Loves a Pancake: Why Good AI Should Not Flatten Complex Work
Flat. Neat. Easy to consume. Missing several load-bearing ingredients.
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AI Productivity Is Too Vague. Show the Burden Removed.
Not vague productivity. Specific relief with receipts.
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Turn AI Output Into Infrastructure
AI compounds when it helps create the thing that helps create future things.
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Chat Is the Workshop, Not the Warehouse
A lot of AI value dies in the scroll swamp, where good ideas go to be vaguely remembered.
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Good AI Should Leave You With Something Usable
The answer helps once. The artifact helps again.
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Unnamed Work Becomes Weather
It just happens. People feel it. People plan around it. Nobody owns it.
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AI Ecosystems Beat AI Assistants
An assistant helps with a task. An ecosystem supports a pattern of work.
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Give AI a Job Description Before Giving It Access
“Just help with stuff” is not a job description. It is how weird stuff happens.
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Not Every AI Should Be the Same AI
Human teams have roles for a reason. AI needs the same distinction.
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Margin Is the Metric for Useful AI
Speed without margin is just burnout with better tooling.
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Automation Should Not Eat the Human
When automation develops its own administrative ecosystem, it has started charging rent.
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AI Should Protect Aliveness, Not Just Increase Output
The point of AI is not to become a more efficient toaster.
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Invisible Work Is Still Work, and AI Can Help Reveal It
Remembering is work. Noticing is work. It is just badly marketed.
Read More →AI Is Best at the Work Before the Work
By the time you start the real work, half your energy has already been mugged in the parking lot.
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Accountability Should Not Require Archaeology
That is not a process. That is a scavenger hunt with legal exposure.
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"I Think We Talked About This" Is Not a Control
The worst time to document a decision is after something goes wrong.
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Reminders Are Not Systems: Building AI Rhythms That Actually Work
You have to perform for reminders. You get to live in a system.
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Set It and Forget It Is a Trap in AI Automation
“Set it and forget it” is how rot gets a login. The better model is rhythm.
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Heroics Are Usually a Design Problem
The late-night save is a signal: a broken system relying on one person's goodwill.
Read More →Most Knowledge Work Is Recurring Work Pretending to Be One-Off
I have been the human copy-paste bridge. The bridge is tired.
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How Small AI Requests Become Repeatable Workflows
Be suspicious of small requests. Many of them are secretly recurring workflows.
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The Task Is Never the Task: AI and Hidden Workflows
Ask AI for a grocery list, and it will reveal the operating system underneath your life.
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Human-in-the-Loop AI Is Not Enough
A human reviewer at the wrong point is not governance. It is theater with a comments field.
Read More →AI Should Prepare Decisions, Not Replace Human Judgment
Most leaders are not lacking judgment. They are lacking clean inputs.
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Why Metaphor Matters in AI System Design
The right metaphor isn't decoration. It's how you know what you are building.
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When to Use a Broad AI Prompt and When to Get Specific
“Just help with this” is a creativity engine. It is not a system.
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The Problem With One Giant AI Assistant
One AI for everything eventually becomes a very articulate junk drawer.
Read More →The AI Moment Is Now — Are You Navigating It or Reacting to It?
The organizations that will thrive aren't the ones moving fastest. They're the ones moving wisest.
Read More →What AI Governance Actually Means (And Why Most Organizations Get It Wrong)
Governance isn't a compliance checkbox. It's the architecture of accountability.
Read More →How to Talk About AI Without the Hype (Or the Panic)
Most public conversation about AI swings between utopia and apocalypse. There's a better way.
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