Articles

Essays and field notes by topic.

One article library, organized by topic rather than separate blogs.

WANTED: TEN YEARS' EXPERIENCE IN SOMETHING INVENTED IN 2022

Systems · September 04, 2026

WANTED: TEN YEARS' EXPERIENCE IN SOMETHING INVENTED IN 2022

ChatGPT is three years and nine months old and the ads ask for ten years with it. AI job titles went from 264 to 822 in four years while total postings rose 6 percent. Companies now appoint officers for a thing their own engineers cannot define. Years of experience were a proxy for depth. The proxy failed because the pipes are three years old, and the form still rejects the honest answer.

Your business is not missing from AI. It was never a candidate.

Systems · August 09, 2026

Your business is not missing from AI. It was never a candidate.

Everyone is selling AI visibility. Almost nobody has a denominator. We put buyer questions to AI assistants about ten trading Melbourne businesses, repeated them, and counted. Out of 570 chances to be named, they were named 18 times. Four were never named once. Then the finding that matters: asked whether it knew the specific business, nine of the ten got both answers from the same machine, some runs yes and some runs no. An independent study from SparkToro found the same instability from a different direction, with under a 1 in 100 chance of the same brand list appearing twice. This article covers what that does to every AI visibility report on the market, why the failure happens before your content is read, and the four questions to ask any vendor selling you a number. It includes our own business as the worked case, along with two findings we published about ourselves that turned out to be wrong.

It's Getting Obvious Who's Actually Thinking

Systems · June 23, 2026

It's Getting Obvious Who's Actually Thinking

For all of history a long, fluent document was expensive, so we read it as proof of the thinking behind it. AI takes that cost to zero, and the receipt becomes a costume. Senior leaders, flooded and unconvinced, would rather you walked into their office than sent a file. Underneath the flood sits a quieter cost: the people outsourcing the thinking are getting weaker, and the shared record is filling with forgettable noise.

The Half of Manifesting That Works

Systems · June 08, 2026

The Half of Manifesting That Works

Manifesting is half right. Expectation does not transmit a request to the universe. It works by changing attention, the body's response, and persistence, which shape the actions that produce a result. The naive version fails because the nervous system reads receipts, not affirmations, and because picturing the win drains the drive to chase it. The working half is concrete: name the outcome and the real obstacle, pick the one move that brings money or progress in, shrink it to a daily rep, bolt it to a fixed trigger, and count the reps you control.