The archive

Every lesson we've published.

Newest first. Browse by room from the nav, or by company and problem from the database. Older pieces stay reachable forever — we don't archive away from URLs.

A close-up editorial desk scene shot from a slightly elevated angle: two printed paragraphs… Llm 6 min read
Llm

LLM Prompt Engineering for Editorial Judgment: What Actually Moved the Needle

I gave a model forty paragraphs from a newsletter draft and asked it to rate each one from 1 to 10 on "editorial quality." It returned thirty-one sevens, six eights, two sixes, and one nine.

R Rachel Dunmore
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A close-up photorealistic photograph of a modern developer's workspace at night, dominated by a… Web Standards 5 min read
Web Standards

Streaming HTML vs. Server-Side Includes: What the HTML Specification Still Won't Do For You

I have written the same include mechanism at least eleven times. Header, footer, nav, the cookie banner nobody wanted.

G George Wentworth
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Wide-angle photorealistic photograph inside a vast, dim data center corridor lined with towering server… Ai Policy 6 min read
Ai Policy

The Sixth Lesson of European AI Policy: You Can Regulate a Thing You Cannot Build

Start with a number that should have ended the debate: as of writing, Europe hosts somewhere around 3 to 5 percent of the world's installed frontier AI compute.

R Robert Halstead
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A close-up over-the-shoulder photograph of a software developer sitting at a dimly lit home… Finance App 5 min read
Finance App

Should You Build Your Own Finance App? I Spent 7 Months Answering That

You've probably asked yourself this while staring at another "Upgrade to Premium" screen: should I just build my own finance app?

S Samuel Kenworth
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A close-up photorealistic photograph of an aging office photocopier in a dimly lit government… National Security 9 min read
National Security

Government AI Adoption Fails at the Photocopier, Not the Model

Here is the claim, stated flat so I can spend the rest of this piece earning it: in almost every large public-sector deployment I have watched, government AI adoption did not fail because the model…

G Grace Ellerton
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A candid documentary-style photograph of a frontline office worker standing at a cluttered desk… Enterprise 9 min read
Enterprise

Lesson Six: The AI Transformation Advice Nobody Sells You (Because It Doesn't Bill Hours)

Here is the advice you have already been given, probably in a board deck, probably by someone charging by the day: AI transformation is a strategy problem, not a technology problem, so you should hire…

C Caroline Hester
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A young software engineer sitting alone at a minimalist home desk in dim evening… Ai 6 min read
Ai

Lesson Six: What AI in Entertainment Actually Changes About the Job You're Chasing

I got a rejection email from a streaming-infrastructure company on a Tuesday. The role was "media pipeline engineer," I'd made it to the third round, and the recruiter said they were "pausing the req…

C Charlotte Kinsley
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A wide-angle photorealistic photograph of the European Commission's Berlaymont building in Brussels at dusk… Investing 6 min read
Investing

Lesson Six: How to Read EU Regulation Like an Investor, Not a Headline

The European Commission fined Google roughly 8 billion euros across three antitrust cases between 2017 and 2019.

R Rachel Dunmore
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A dimly lit security operations center at night, photographed with a wide-angle lens, showing… Liability 5 min read
Liability

Lesson Six: How to Read AI Security Vulnerabilities When Two Governments Are Lying to You

Here is a number I could not verify, and neither, probably, can you: 25,000 accounts, 28.8 million exchanges.

A Andrew Pemberton
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A dimly lit corporate audit room at dusk, a lone compliance auditor in a… Tooling 6 min read
Tooling

Reliability Engineering for LLM Workflows: Ensembles vs. the Single-Model Call

A prompt I shipped for a loan-adjudication assistant passed every review we threw at it. Temperature zero. Golden test set of 240 cases, 238 correct. Legal signed off.

E Emma Stanfield
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