Moats and Moonshots
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
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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.
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Jun 28, 2026
Reliable AI vs. Coin Flip
Ask the same AI the same question twice and you may get two different answers. The difference isn't always the model. It's often how much guessing your data forces it to do. Better data doesn't just improve AI. It makes it reliable.
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Jun 21, 2026
Hello CEO! Own Your Data. Own Your AI. Own Your Destiny.
Last week I wrote about how AI companies in verticals treat their customer base as fuel rods to build their nuclear power. This week I am going to expand on it and make a case for working with a systems
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Jun 14, 2026
The AI Trap Door
I have been on the road for three weeks now. Pensacola was pleasant. Memphis was muggy. Buffalo was chill. But the mood in the small business is one of nervous anticipation. It's like welcoming back a long-lost sibling,
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Jun 7, 2026
The Pause Is a Tell
Earlier this week, Anthropic asked the rest of the industry to slow down. A coordinated pause, before AI gets good enough to improve itself without us. This is the lab that has always sold itself as the careful one, and
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May 31, 2026
The Mess Just Got Cheap
Power transmission companies often do not know what to charge carriers for tower access. No software tells them, and no vendor sells the answer. The work does not live cleanly inside one system. It sits across contracts, tower assets, field
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May 24, 2026
The Two Million Dollar Shrug
One conversation keeps coming up with mid-market CEOs. Roughly two million dollars on AI over the last eighteen months. Four vendors. Two pilots. A consultant retainer. A small team hired off LinkedIn to run the program. Asked what has changed
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May 17, 2026
The Doers, The Watchers and a Two-Week Milestone
Depending on whom you talk to you get one of the three immutable truths about AI implementations: 1. The tooling is unstable, observability is difficult, and security is a nightmare 2. Whatever works is magical, but when the job depends
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May 10, 2026
Moative Essay: The Two-Week Test
A physician owns seven clinics across two states. Revenue is up. Patients are growing. The newest location opened in March. On paper, the business is exactly what a founder hopes to build. She is also fifty-nine. Her children have their
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May 3, 2026
Moative Essay: The Brownfield Tax
Anthropic acknowledged late April what Claude Code users had been complaining about for weeks. The product had been silently degrading. Product-layer changes around reasoning, caching, and prompt behavior had drifted in ways the people running it did not catch in
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Apr 26, 2026
Moative Essay: Earl, Tom, and The Guild
Tom is a firefighter. Years ago, we built him what was basically an Excel-spreadsheet version of AI. No agents. No copilots. No white paper about the future of work. Just a thing that helped him make better decisions under pressure.