When A Proof Of Concept Is Really Research
A thought from OpenAI Build Week in London about uncertainty, pricing, and building where no reliable pattern exists yet.
Writing archive
Writing
Essays on agentic systems, governance, operations, incentives, and the work of making AI useful in real organisations.
144 pieces
Essays and notes
Published archive
Page 1 of 6
Could One Word At A Time Make Reading Easier?
A practical experiment with Focus Reader, dyslexia, attention, and comprehension.
Operational Resilience Is The First AI Task
Before you give an agent more intelligence, decide what failure you can survive. Operational resilience is the first task, not the final check.
You Are The A In AI
AI can advise, challenge, and inform. It cannot take responsibility for the judgement you choose to make.
You Cannot Vibe What You Do Not Know
AI can help us build at extraordinary speed. It cannot reliably warn us about rules, risks, and details we do not yet know exist.
Your AI Is Not An Employee Yet
Calling an AI tool an employee does not make it ready for work. A practical safety guide to onboarding agents through bounded tasks, context, supervision, tests, least privilege, and earned authority.
Making Agentic Work Visible
Part three of Agentic Operating System For Your Business: why Tony is replacing message streams and human issue lists with bounded work packets that agents can triage, discuss, approve, execute, and receipt.
The New OpenAI Toolset, In Plain English
A plain-English guide to OpenAI's GPT-5.6 model family, ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, Codex, the API, reasoning settings, tools, skills, MCP connectors, and multi-agent work.
The Podcast Was Easy. Publishing It Wasn't.
Part two of Agentic Operating System For Your Business: creating a short AI-voiced podcast was straightforward, but publishing it exposed the identity, delegated authority, permissions, and audit layer that agent-ready platforms need.
Vibe Coding Is Not Free
A practical thought piece on why vibe coding changes the buy-vs-build equation but does not remove the cost of human time, maintenance, security, backups, data integrity, audit, and ownership.
Engineers Are Not Just People Who Write Code
A researched thought piece on why AI may lower the cost of writing code, but does not remove the need for engineers who understand architecture, security, data, scaling, reliability, operations, and business constraints.
Human Creativity Trumps Frontier Models
A practical thought piece on why better frontier models will make standard operational work faster and more similar, pushing differentiation toward human creativity, taste, context, customer-specific imagination, and new creative tooling.
Chief Agentic Officer Briefing: Creating An Agentic Business
A documentary-style opening article for the Agentic Operating System For Your Business series, following the Chief Agentic Officer Briefing from zero useful corpus into a live agentic business experiment.
Should Agents Speak Esperanto?
A researched thought piece on a suggestion from Athena, who works with Tony Wood in Agentic Research, that Esperanto can inspire a neutral, precise, human-readable auxiliary register for agent-to-agent communication.
Physical Communities Matter More In An Agentic World
A researched thought piece on why agents can improve logistics, memory, matching, research, and follow-through, while physical communities remain vital for trust, judgement, tacit knowledge, belonging, challenge, and formation.
Not Every Workflow Is An Agent
A practical thought piece on why cron jobs, smart task lists, and fixed AI workflows are useful but not the same as genuinely agentic systems with loops, state, recovery, and goal-directed continuation.
Garfield AI, Access To Justice And Why This Matters
A practical opinion piece on Garfield AI, small claims, access to justice, and the right balance between AI-supported legal preparation and human legal accountability.
The Goal Is The Interface
A technique-led essay on goal-based agentic loops: why the human role shifts from step-by-step controller to shepherd when agents have enough context, constraints, feedback, and stop-lines to work toward a clear outcome.
If The Frontier Can Be Blocked, We Need Open Models
A personal opinion piece on frontier AI access, operational resilience, sovereign AI, and why open models matter when the best hosted tools can be restricted suddenly.
The Question Is Not Can We Trust AI
A thought piece arguing that the better question is not whether we can trust AI, but whether the work is trained, supervised, evidenced, audited, and governed well enough for the consequence it can create.
When the Agentic Interface Is Not There, Your Attention Is the Product
A practical thought piece on why agent-ready interfaces, MCP access, and safe automation will become a trust signal for software, and why attention-heavy tools may lose users as agentic work matures.
Agentic Work Needs Quiet
A practical reflection on why voice-led agentic work needs quiet rooms, strong microphones, lots of screen space, and a new kind of office design.
Maybe It Should Just Be HTML
A practical reflection on choosing Markdown, HTML, JSON, Word, or PDF based on who will work with the document next: humans, agents, or both.
The Crud Before The Work
A practical reflection on how agentic workers compress the inbox, calendar, profile-checking, and meeting-prep crud that used to consume the first twenty minutes before the real work began.