Left of the Loop: The Phoenix
Herodotus wrote of a bird that lived five hundred years in Arabia, and when its life came to an end, it did not wait to be surprised by death. It bu…
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Herodotus wrote of a bird that lived five hundred years in Arabia, and when its life came to an end, it did not wait to be surprised by death. It bu…
A hearth fire required no priest, no temple, no calendar date. It required a fire and a household. When a city sent settlers to found a colony, they…
Before a young Athenian took his full place in the city, he spent two years in the ephebeia. Training happened in the gymnasion, organized by tribe,…
The kybernetes was the helmsman who steered a Greek ship, reading the wind and working the steering-oar to hold a course. The word is the root of tw…
The most important step in the old process was never written down: the confused developer getting up, walking across the room, and asking. It worked…
When I wrote about shifting the engineering process left — spec sessions, autonomous agents, humans reviewing output rather than writing code — a qu…
In an ancient Greek household, the oikonomos was the steward: the one trusted to manage the estate’s resources so the whole household prospered. The…
An astrolabe doesn’t map every star. It gives you a way to find your position relative to the ones that hold still. That’s the instrument I reach fo…
A trireme was the warship that made Athens a power in the Mediterranean — not for its size, but for its structure. Three banks of oars, a hundred an…
The Athenian agora wasn't a building. It was an open space where citizens gathered to think in public — argument, trade, philosophy, policy, all hap…
Anthropic's engineers ship eight times more code than they did a few years ago. And they had to start scheduling lunches so people would talk to eac…
I noticed something a few months ago. I was talking less to my colleagues. Not because anything was wrong. I had a question, I described it to an AI…
"A fool with a tool is still a fool." — often attributed to Grady Booch I keep coming back to this quote when I watch teams adopt AI. In my last pos…
The Wrong End of the Problem Every company wants AI in their development process right now. That part is clear. What's less clear is where they're p…
Table of Contents The Integration Problem That Broke Industry 4.0 MCP: The Vertical Connection Layer How MCP Connects to Servers, Tools, and Databas…
--- title: "Client-Side LLM Optimization Is Misunderstood" description: "Client-side LLM inference is a false fix for AI cost, latency, and security…