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.
Writing archive
Writing - Page 2
Older essays on agentic systems, governance, operations, incentives, and the work of making AI useful in real organisations.
152 pieces
Essays and notes
Published archive
Page 2 of 7
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.
Agentic Architecture Is Layers All The Way Down
Agentic architecture is not one clever model or one workflow. It is a layered environment of servers, access, runtimes, data, protocols, identity, firewalls, applications, work rooms, visualisation, and operational resilience.
Even LLMs Need a Firewall
A practical reflection on why LLM firewalls, tool gates, and deterministic controls are really an old Stoic idea: not every thought deserves to become an action.
Thank You, Mum
A personal thank-you to my mum for the patience, belief, faith, strength, and hours she gave me as a dyslexic child learning to read and write, and for what AI has finally helped me unlock.
When The Tool Can Be Turned Off
A researched operational resilience piece on the abrupt suspension of access to Anthropic Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and what it means for European organisations relying on critical US software and AI services.
AI Agents for CEOs: Start Simple
A simple CEO guide to trying AI agents: run one useful demo, keep data bounded, back up the working state, and start with one repeatable workflow.
Release Us From The Tyranny Of The Wizard
A reflective thought piece on moving from rigid software wizards and menu trees toward agentic tools that can work from intent, while still respecting the moments where precision matters.
Why Isn't Every Menu Agent-Ready Yet?
A short observation from a Stockholm restaurant on why small businesses should make menus, specials, local context, and choices easy for personal AI agents to understand.
What If Everybody Knew Everything They Needed To Know?
A reflective essay on what happens when personal agentic systems make public knowledge, local government information, product evidence, and hidden context understandable to ordinary citizens.
When The Agent Thinks You Are Wrong
A research-backed reflection on how agentic systems should challenge humans when they believe a decision is wrong: respectful escalation, evidence, thresholds, stop-line rules, and human override.
Management Is The Missing Literacy
A follow-on to the agentic-worker education piece, arguing that management should become a general literacy: setting outcomes, judging quality, managing attention, using AI well, and taking responsibility for decisions.
We Need To Teach Children How To Manage Agentic Workers
A reflective, research-backed article arguing that the next school skill is not only AI literacy, but learning how to manage interrupting agentic workers: context switching, delegation, judgement, and knowing when to pause before accepting a recommended action.
Getting Things Done With Agentic Workers
A practical reflection on using Orchistra and agentic workers to cover the skills a small consulting business needs, while treating token spend as operating capital that has to be watched.
AI Is Not One Thing
A gentle argument for using more precise AI language: chatbot, generative AI, agentic system, local AI, foundation model, AI system, or safety-critical AI, depending on what we actually mean.
The New Product Manager May Be An Engineer Who Reskilled
AI is changing product-to-engineering ratios, but the deeper shift is capability: product managers now need engineering-grade judgement, and senior engineers may be closer to the new product role than many expect.
Before There Is No Work Left, We Have Human Debt To Pay Down
A reflection on agentic AI, productivity, and the backlog of work society has avoided because there has never been enough time.
What Agentic AI Is Teaching Me About Teaching Humans
A reflection from teaching the University of Exeter MSc Financial Technology hackathon: clearer outcomes, examples of good work, tasks, roles, mindset, and room to think help humans as much as agents.