The long-form stuff — AI, markets, management, and the occasional thing that wouldn't leave me alone.
Every new medium begins by filming the old one, and AI agents are no exception: most replicate a human job a little faster and cheaper. The prize is the rarer move — the thing the old form could never stage at all.
The authority nobody hands a stranger isn't won by being right out loud. It's earned by fixing what's broken without making anyone feel replaced — which I learned, as usual, by getting it wrong first.
For thirty years, creative software sold the difficulty of learning it. AI didn't kill the skill — it killed the scarcity. And Adobe is stuck at a fork where both roads end in the same mouth.
I'm not an SEO expert, but I've sat through enough SEO audits to know what they were really for: cover. AI just put the one scarce thing they sold on sale to everyone.
Anthropic's own economists show the math for compensating the knowledge workers AI displaces — and admit, in their own words, that transfers like that almost never happen on their own.
Everyone assumed AI would reward the technical profiles. Handed real work it behaves like a team, not a tool — and the craft that turned out to carry the weight wasn't engineering. It was management.
Two AI oracles, the same numbers, opposite verdicts — each delivered with total confidence. I tested whether the fundamentals would line up like a horoscope. The market charged me the difference and called it tuition.
Ordinary courtesy was never only virtue — it was policed, because cruelty to people carried a price. The machine is the first relationship where that toll is zero, and the servant, as ever, reveals the master.
No one ever got fired for taking profit. It is survival gear for beginners and a slow leak for everyone else — right on every single trade and wrong across all of them at once, emptying the account with the very discipline meant to protect it.
