Moats and Moonshots
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
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Sep 20, 2026
AI for Complicated is not AI for Complex
Healthcare billing is miserable. It is also finite. Ten thousand codes, four hundred payers, all of it learnable by a smart enough brain. Yet every vendor calls it complex, because complex supports a premium and complicated supports a statement of work.
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Sep 13, 2026
FDX: The executive that FDEs need to meet
AI adoption needs more than Forward Deployed Engineers. It needs Forward Deployed Executives: industry veterans with the scars, judgment, and institutional memory to know not just how to automate a workflow, but why it exists in the first place.
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Sep 12, 2026
The Dawn of Enterprise Agency Engineering
The next challenge for enterprise AI isn't intelligence, but agency: deciding what AI can see, remember, decide and do, and who is accountable. As models grow smarter, enterprises must engineer how machines safely act within the company without giving away control.
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Aug 30, 2026
The Cost of Taking Things Out
A company can remember why everything was added and still have no theory of what it should keep. This is where subtraction becomes organizational craft: someone must see across local decisions, decide what matters now, and have permission to remove.
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Aug 23, 2026
Your IT Department should not be in the IT room anymore
Your IT department should not be in the IT room anymore. IT departments have to be replaced wholesale by AI departments. They have to be managing intelligence and maintaining it, sitting on the shopfloor, not in the IT rooms.
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Aug 16, 2026
Don't shortsell your know-how to AI vendors
An FDE's deliverable is a working outcome inside the customer's environment. An FDE's byproduct is a product. If the byproduct is not a product, you do not have an FDE. You have a contractor.
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Aug 9, 2026
Goodhart's Law & Wrong Measures for Agent Outputs
With people you got a warning, and it was usually free. Somebody grumbles that the target is stupid. An AI agent files no complaint. It gets better at the number, night after night, while the rework piles up somewhere nobody is looking. No alarm goes off.
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Aug 2, 2026
A poem on the half-life of AI
Judgment is where the moat is. Judgment is commodity. There is no moat. There is only cash flow. Every rung was a real claim, defended by real people, funded at a real premium, correct for a few months to a few years. Then the half-life shortened again.
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Jul 26, 2026
Software is becoming malleable
Software is becoming malleable. The future isn't SaaS or services, but software users can extend themselves. Every product will become a platform with building blocks and guardrails, putting the roadmap in the hands of its customers.
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Jul 19, 2026
After Intelligence, Craft
The fashionable answer to abundance in AI is taste. When anyone can generate an interface, write a campaign, design a product or produce a strategy, the argument goes, the advantage will belong to those who can distinguish the excellent from
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Jul 12, 2026
Instrumenting work: Avoiding expensive AI rollout
Every system of record keeps the outcome and drops the work that produced it. A model trained on records can react to a bad outcome, but it can't see why it keeps happening, because the cause never made it into the data. Prediction reads outcomes; prevention needs causes.
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Jul 5, 2026
Forward Deployed Engineers. Embrace with Caution.
Forward-deployed engineers can accelerate your AI journey, but whose interests are they serving? The biggest AI decision isn't the model you choose. It's who owns your architecture, your data, and the freedom to change course.