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Thinking out loud on AI, automation, and how senior practitioners actually use these tools.
Financial Analysis Needs AI at the Edges. Never in the Math.
A colleague recently asked me how he would run financial analysis with AI over the books of an accounting system: the ledgers, the trial balances, the P&Ls. He had three options on the table and...
You cannot fire your AI agents
A branch came in for review with about sixty commits on it, every one authored by someone on the team. He hadn't written them. Claude Desktop had, running on his laptop, signing commits with the git...
Adoption Is a Latency Problem: The Zero-Backlog Policy
Notes from an AI video project, and the release cadence that turned one team into the project's owners The most common artifact of an enterprise AI rollout is a dead feedback channel. It gets created...
AI dragons: capable of everything, governed by nothing
Last weekend the season finale of House of the Dragon ran for seventy-five minutes. I decided that was long enough to build an agentic chatbot. That was my goal. And I was determined to make it. So I...
Three studies measured agentic AI adoption. They got 23%, 59% and 20%.
A colleague forwarded me an internal slide with one number on it. Fifty-nine percent of companies are using agentic AI. And the bullet point underneath it said we were behind. What followed it was a...
Vibe Coding Won't Kill Developers. It'll Kill the Middle.
When good cameras got cheap, everyone predicted the death of professional photography. The prediction landed wrong. The low end died outright: stock libraries, cheap portraits, mass-event coverage...
80% of Companies Are Already Out of Step With the AI Act and Don't Know It
The tool worked. That was never the problem. A business manager had specced it with AI, straight from the business need, and the result did what he asked: it ran, it produced output, it looked...
Is Your Knowledge Base Actually Thinking, or Just Retrieving?
A while back I was able to build a working knowledge base in less than an hour. Fifty-five minutes to be accurate. I started by opening VS Code with Claude Code in the side panel. I had documentation...
The On-Premise LLM Lottery
I lost a full long weekend to OpenClaw once. Friday to Sunday, trying to get it running locally with an on-premise LLM on my personal machine. The machine was reasonably capable, though nothing close...
Notes from the Cyber AI Expo: the tool is not the point
I went to the Cyber / AI Expo in Munich a couple of days ago expecting a sales floor. There was one. The thing I came away thinking about, though, wasn't on any booth. The expo was predictable...
The Hidden Mental Model That Determines Whether AI Tools Help You
I built a working knowledge base while I was in a one-hour company meeting, waiting for my turn to give my briefing. Even I was surprised at how fast it came together. And it was not a mockup. It was...
Can a Non-Coder Become a Coder Just With AI?
My company decided to lean into AI — to let people who had never written code build real software with it. I thought that was the right call, and I still do. The logic behind the decision seems...
AI in the Data, Code in the Process
If you need the same answer twice, don't use AI. I learned this the hard way during a project where headquarters mandated to use OpenClaw - an AI orchestration platform and workflow automation tool...
AI Doesn't Think For You, It Thinks Like You
A few weeks ago a Business Manager handed me a 50-page AI-generated technical spec. The document was impressive. The perspective behind it was the problem. I had talked to him a few days earlier...
My two days at the Milano AI Week 2026
I went to Milano AI Week 2026 expecting demos. I came back with observations — about the technology, the people, and a few small things I didn't expect to remember. The event is positioned as...
Why Your AI Proof-of-Concept Will Never Make It to Production
The demo was flawless. The AI model processed customer support tickets in real-time, categorized them accurately, and even drafted preliminary responses that sounded human. The VP of Customer Success...