Ask most engineers what MCP is and you’ll get the same answer: a way to plug tools into an LLM. Fair enough, as far as it goes. But that description treats MCP like plumbing, and after months building MCP-based integrations for large enterprise platforms, I don’t think plumbing is the right metaphor. Plumbing moves water […]

Every knowledge program seems to begin with the same request. A senior engineer is leaving in six weeks, and someone asks her to document the process she’s carried for years. She returns a clean flowchart of the happy path. The drawing is accurate and may even be elegant. It leaves out the thresholds she watches, […]

Is the current furore in mathematics the canary in the coalmine for experimental science and knowledge work? This post was originally published in Vanishing Gradients on September 11, 2026. It has been updated to address the subsequent declaration by 25 Fields Medalists and the debate about AI, mathematical progress, and research incentives. Science without understanding? […]

During a service incident, a customer-remediation workflow is moved onto an emergency route because the situation is critical and the team needs a fast resolution. Approvals are shortened, a priority queue is opened, and an on-call agent is cleared to use an alternate procedure until the service recovers. The incident ends, but the route stays […]

There is more technical content available today than any human being could read in a thousand lifetimes. Every topic has a dozen YouTube videos, three Substack posts, a GitHub repo, and a Reddit thread, most created in the last six months and, in many cases, technically accurate. And yet most of the professionals I talk […]