Containment as the primary agent strategy solves half the problem Somewhere right now, a architecture council is walking through a slide titled “AI Agent Containment Strategy.” Sandboxed runtime. Egress allowlist. Tool permissions. A kill switch with a satisfying red icon. Everyone nods, because nodding at a kill switch is what security and risk reviewers do. Nobody asks about the engineer down the hall whose job requires production write access, because he isn’t on the slide. He’s not an AI. He’s just Dave, and whatever governs what Dave can do, it isn’t a sandbox. Agency is the capacity to act independently…
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I poured hours into building an application by hand on weekends, only to end up with the foundation in place. My favorite tool is aging I’ve been using Microsoft Money since 1998. Microsoft killed it back in 2010. As a consolation prize, they released a free version called Money Plus Sunset Edition, and I’ve been using it ever since. A discontinued build of a discontinued product, still sitting on my machine in 2026. The funny thing is it still works. What stopped working is everything around it. Banks and brokerages keep retiring the formats it can read, so importing a…
Morgan Freeman was talking about actors. The line lands harder on managers. “You can’t take credit for talent; you can only take credit for using it.” – Morgan Freeman As a manager, it’s tempting to take credit for discovering and unlocking someone’s potential. It’s easier to believe that through your hard coaching, mentoring, and guiding hands, you somehow produced this talent standing before you. But that’s not really how it works. The talent was already there. The skills, ability, and potential belonged to the individual long before you stepped in. At best, a manager can recognize it, create the right…
Per-token costs are collapsing. Total AI coding spend is climbing anyway. That isn’t a contradiction. It’s a 160-year-old paradox doing exactly what it has always doing. Somewhere in second quarter there will be a budget review where two slides will appear to be in disagreement. One shows the price of a thousand tokens, and the line slopes down and to the right, the way the cost of a maturing technology is supposed to. The next slide shows the monthly spend on AI coding tools, and that line climbs up and to the right, steeply, and nobody in the room can…
In Part 1: “Ontologies, Back in Fashion”, there are 2 things traveling under the word “ontology”. The first is the ambitious version (automated reasoning, machines inferring facts nobody stated) which is “roughly where it was 20 years ago: academic, brittle, confined to narrow domains”. The second is the humble version; an agreed vocabulary, stable identifiers, a declared column meaning that two systems can check without holding a meeting. Part 1’s claim is that the humble version is quietly working well in the regulated finance, kept alive by regulatory mandate rather than hype. The LLM angle was flagged as a “plausible…