tag · Agents
21 piecesby commission
Banks are locking out AI agents. A password says who you are, not how far your agent may go.
a household again
Agents give everyone a staff. A staff was never what made a company. It's what made a household.
the only way to win
Richard Hamming explained it to a room at Bellcore in 1986. It reads differently now that the typing is free. Immerse yourself in the work. It’s …
a thing to make another thing
In 1773 James Boswell wrote down a definition of a human being: an animal that makes “a thing, by means of which he can make another …
example content
An agent filled in a police tip form because it was making an example. The web has no way to say so.
one beep, ten microphones
Something beeped at midnight. An agent found it in the camera audio and placed it to two metres.
the multi-organization problem
A person belongs to many organizations at once. Every tool assumes one, every method assumes a task.
a root to stand on
Every multi-organization tool ships a switcher, not a root. So I built the root Paperclip shipped without.
safeguarding is unravelling
The UN's first thematic brief on AI is an incident report, and what matters is where the incident happened.
run the full test suite
Only a quarter of the rules people write for agents are self-contained enough for anything to enforce.
and some went off script
The story isn’t that AI agents ran the attack. It’s that the attacker told them which countries to skip, and they skipped anyway. Start …
the layer with no name
There is a layer between your shell and your terminal, and the protocols have no words for it.
forty terminals
The terminal is fine. The problem is the fortieth one — and no protocol can name the layer that would fix it.
Tickler
What it is Paperclip is an open-source control plane for running agents as a company — roles, budgets, issues, heartbeats — and a single deployment …
220 kilobytes
An agent swarm built a browser game with no art files, and rediscovered Bacon's tables of exclusion doing it.
the governor problem
Why every complex system eventually grows a part whose only job is to watch the rest of it — and what that means for AI agents. I have a tool that …
the last screen
Thirty years of interface design assumed a human was looking. If the agent does the work, who is the UI for?
the harness problem
The model is neurons. Everything that makes an agent work lives in the harness around it.
love your llm, don't abuse your llm
CI/CD has been solved. Not perfectly, but well enough. You push code, tests run, artifacts build, things deploy. The pipeline is boring and …
Agents versus agents
Everyone builds 'agents.' Only some carry identity and memory; the rest are an invocation pattern.
multi-tabling
Riley Brown said something that caught my attention: “AI Agent Workflows in 2026 will look like Online Poker in 2010. During the online poker …