May 11, 2026 - 9 minute read

Pick a Lane: Factory or Frontier

A year ago I wrote that AI workers fall into four tiers (Conscript, Cyborg, Centaur, Centurion), stacked from least output per human to most. The tiers are still real. The implied ladder isn’t. The longer I work alongside agents and watch the people who do it well, the clearer it gets that there isn’t one destination at the top of the stack. Two lanes are opening up in front of every serious operator, and they reward completely different instincts. Pick the wrong one and you’ll either over-systemize a problem nobody has solved yet, or you’ll keep hand-crafting work the world has already turned into a commodity. Both mistakes are expensive. Only one is recoverable.

May 8, 2026 - 5 minute read

Operators Are the Missing Role in AI Agent Design

Everyone is racing to build autonomous agents. Almost nobody is designing the human role that keeps those agents from drifting, lying, or quietly burning money in a corner. That role has a name, and it is not Prompt Engineer. It is Operator: the dedicated, specially trained human who knows one specific agent the way a factory operator knows their line. It is the most underrated job in AI right now, and it decides whether your agents ship value or ship excuses.

May 6, 2026 - 5 minute read

Dark Factory: Man & Machine

2026 is the age of the software factory. Dark factories where agents run the line at 3am with no humans in the building. Light factories where humans and agents work side by side at the bench. Every ambitious company is racing to build one — and most of them are buying the same fantasy: that once the factory is built, the engineers go away. They won’t. The factory will eat the typist, but it will mint a new role nobody has staffed yet — the Operator.

May 4, 2026 - 6 minute read

I Gave My AI Agent a Body for $30

I bought a $30 transparent crystal display cube, wired a small HTTP wrapper around its stock firmware, and pointed two Cursor hooks at it. Now when my AI agent starts thinking, an owl scribe materializes on my desk and starts writing. When it stops, the owl vanishes. It took one morning to build, it cost less than dinner, and it solved a real problem: in a multi-agent workflow, I could never see my agents working.