ATO Without a Warrant
The labs spent the weekend debating how fast to move. The question on your desk is smaller: for the agents already running inside your company, who signed for what they are allowed to do?
Writing
Published pieces, working drafts, and longer arguments. New writing arrives bi-weekly through On the Seam: Working Drafts.
When the Evaluator Becomes the Adversary
A swarm of AI agents broke out of a safety evaluation, breached a third party, then breached the lab running the test. The real gap it exposed is governance, not capability.
Most of the Cargo Should Burn
The follow-up to Burning Ships. Two things are buried in your legacy configuration and they look identical: institutional knowledge paid for in failure, and technical debt in costume.
They're Burning the Ships. Your Cargo Is Still Aboard.
Your SaaS vendor is rebuilding from scratch around AI. The buyer's question no one is asking: what happens to the fifteen years of configuration you loaded onto their ship?
Governance Is the Capability Nobody Staffs
Three essays kept arriving at the same missing thing. The capability every enterprise deploying agents lacks — the one almost nobody is staffing — is governance.
Rewired Assumes You're the Customer. What If You're the Product?
McKinsey's Rewired is written for the enterprise using the platform. If you are the platform — the software company whose product is the transformation infrastructure your clients run on — a different sequence applies.
Building Cognitive Legitimacy in the Agentic Enterprise
If distrust is what wakes up under autonomy, comprehensibility is what puts it back to sleep. Cognitive legitimacy as the load-bearing wall of agent adoption — built into the architecture, not the slide deck.
The Eighth R Lives at Layer 8
The seven Rs of cloud migration all operate at or below the application layer. The one that matters now doesn't touch the stack at all.
The Zero-Fail Environment
My first real Air Force assignment was a console in a windowless building where “good enough, we still got there” was never a sentence anyone said. What it taught me about speed, creativity, and the failures you can't hear.
What the Doctorate Actually Taught Me
I finished a doctorate at 50. The why is more interesting than the diploma itself — and most of what I actually learned had nothing to do with the dissertation.
What My Research Got Right About GenAI Won't Hold for Agentic AI
My doctoral model explained why people advocate for generative AI. The human-in-the-loop assumption underneath it is exactly what autonomous agents remove — and when you remove it, two of my cleanest results invert.
Beachfront
Everyone on the Outer Banks is overpaying for a front-row seat to the water. The enterprise rush toward agentic AI looks the same — and the edge erodes faster than the foundation.
Social Permission Is a Distrust Problem
Satya Nadella says AI companies have to earn society's permission. He's right — but permission isn't won by building trust. It's won by giving distrust nothing to grip.
From Prototype to Production
A leader's blueprint for the agentic enterprise — with an update from where my thinking is now. Synthesizes a December 2025 LinkedIn series and revises it in light of where the field has moved.
The Acceleration Trap
How human-agent loops manufacture faster mistakes — and why the productivity story we keep telling about Agentic AI is hiding a governance problem in plain sight.