Artificial Intelligence
Be Careful What You Ask For: Google Licensing News Won’t Feel Like Justice
Publishers are still on the long ramp down in referrals from organic search, although I still maintain that “Google Zero” is more marketing than prophecy. One hoped-for outcome commonly discussed is that AI crawlers, including Google, will enter into content licensing agreements with publishers. My worry is that publishers will like a world where Google…
Control Charts Make AI Agents Cheaper, Less Necessary, and More Useful
According to my new control charts, it’s been 35 days since I posted to this blog. Subjectively, that’s too long. Objectively, it raised an alarm in an email I get every morning. I have long wanted a better and more holistic picture of “how things are going” but instead of settling for an agent like…
A Five-Step Approach to Deploying AI in Labor-Intensive Businesses
A recent academic paper about the economic significance of the “up or out” employment system used by famous consulting firms got me thinking about the economic liberty of employees in the age of artificial intelligence. Consulting is labor-intensive and thus very attractive to both consulting firms and AI tool-builders, but the early returns have mixed…
Vibe Coding is Just Another Way to Say the Same Old Thing
Those of us who have been writing code since at least the early 2000s are familiar with the stereotype of the “cowboy coder.” The term is sort of a double insult — it’s an insult to the individual developer, and it’s also unhelpfully gendered. While I’ve never heard anyone called a cowgirl coder, I have met…
