Category: AI


  • Your First AI Project Should Be Almost Embarrassingly Small

    The quickest way to ruin an AI side project is to describe it too well. You start with a small irritationโ€”maybe you keep losing useful links in Slack. Ten minutes later, the idea has become an โ€œAI-powered knowledge platform for modern teams.โ€ Now it needs accounts, a dashboard, browser extensions, billing and probably a logo…

  • AI Has Made Writing Code Cheaper. Thatโ€™s Not the Same as Making Software Easy

    The strangest thing about AI coding tools is how quickly they make you feel productive. You type a request, watch several files appear, and suddenly there is a login page, a database connection and a button with a tasteful blue gradient. Ten minutes earlier you had an empty folder. Now the terminal is scrolling like…

  • Search Is Getting Easier. Finding the Truth Might Get Harder

    I noticed I had stopped opening search results. Not completely. For train bookings or cafรฉ hours, I still clicked. But for ordinary questionsโ€”how to fix a Gmail filter, which USB-C cable I needed, whether a strange Windows process was normalโ€”I had started reading the AI answer and moving on. It felt efficient. It also felt…

  • You Probably Need Three AI Tools, Not Thirty

    I have a small graveyard of AI accounts. Thereโ€™s one tool I joined because it promised to organise every thought I had. Another was supposed to turn meetings into โ€œactionable intelligence,โ€ which is an impressive phrase for writing down who agreed to send the spreadsheet. A third could generate presentations, websites and social posts. I…

  • Your Next AI Feature May Never Touch the Internet

    A laptop disconnected from Wi-Fi used to become noticeably less clever. Email stopped. Cloud documents complained. Search disappeared. AI tools, especially, became blank boxes waiting for a network connection. That is changing faster than I expected. Phones and laptops are increasingly able to run useful AI models directly on the device. Not the biggest models…

  • Vector Databases Are Useful. Your App May Not Need One Yet

    Vector databases have become one of those technologies people add to project diagrams before they have a project. The pitch is seductive. Your AI assistant will understand company documents, find the right paragraph instantly and answer questions like a colleague who has read every Slack thread since 2019. So the team creates embeddings, opens an…

  • Multi-Agent AI Has a Coordination Problem

    When I first started reading about multi-agent AI, the demos looked convincing. A manager agent handed research to one specialist, another checked numbers, a third wrote the answer, and the whole thing returned with the neatness of a finished project. I also felt slightly suspicious. Software rarely becomes reliable because its components have job titles.…

  • The Most Dangerous AI Answer Is the One That Sounds Finished

    An AI once gave OpenAI researcher Adam Tauman Kalai three different titles for his own doctoral dissertation. None was correct. Asked for his birthday, it supplied three different dates, also wrong. The interesting part wasnโ€™t the error. Search engines return bad results every day, and colleagues misremember things all the time. What stood out was…

  • The AI Didnโ€™t Know. It Just Found the Right PDF

    A familiar office scene: someone asks an internal AI assistant about the companyโ€™s travel policy. The answer appears in seconds, written with the calm confidence these systems have even when theyโ€™re making things up. The employee reads it, nods, and nearly books a hotel outside the allowed limit. The AI found an old policy document.…

  • The Prompt Was Never the Real Skill

    A colleague once showed me a prompt he was unusually proud of. It was almost two pages longโ€”headings, rules, role descriptions, forbidden phrases and a stern warning that the AI must โ€œthink carefully before responding.โ€ He called it his master prompt. It worked for three weeks. Then the team changed the kind of report they…