Moats and Moonshots
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
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Aug 9, 2026
Goodhart's Law & Wrong Measures for Agent Outputs
With people you got a warning, and it was usually free. Somebody grumbles that the target is stupid. An AI agent files no complaint. It gets better at the number, night after night, while the rework piles up somewhere nobody is looking. No alarm goes off.
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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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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 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 19, 2026
Moative Essay: Systems of Interia
Two of us write this newsletter, alternating Sundays. Every now and then, the shape is call and response: one week someone lays down a theme, the following week the other tries to answer. When that happens, most weeks the response