Commentary
Behavior Patterns for Creating with GenAI
Shared Conceptual Vocabulary for Working with AI
articlethought-leadership
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From the Renaissance Solutions Founder's Desk
The Curious Boomer
A personal newspaper and magazine index for practical notes, field reports, essays, and work-in-progress thinking.
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Field Notes
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Commentary
107 items
article / thought-leadership
Behavior Patterns for Creating with GenAI
Shared Conceptual Vocabulary for Working with AI
article / blog / thought-leadership
AI Is Changing Faster Than Organizations Learn
GenAI models and harnesses can change behind a familiar interface, leaving teams with different mental models and organizations with a new change-management challenge.
article / blog
AI Is Only Magic When We Close Our Eyes
When AI systems behave in unexpected ways, senior leaders need to examine the objectives, tools, permissions, monitoring, and organizational capacity surrounding the model.
article / thought-leadership
The First Tool That Can Speak Before It Knows Why
Generative AI can produce fluent language before purpose, audience, and evidence are fully formed. That changes the thinking loops we need.
article / thought-leadership
The Coverage We Forgot
AI-accelerated delivery needs a broader definition of coverage before teams can release with confidence.
article / thought-leadership
AI Acceleration Is Not AI Maturity
AI can accelerate creation, but operational authority still requires scoped permissions, tested recovery, and clear approval gates.
article / blog
Close the Loop With Your Chatbot
A small practical habit for AI collaboration: return the finished work, name what helped, and observe what the chatbot does next.
article / thought-leadership
When Television Kept Time
A broadcast schedule once shaped shared rhythms inside homes and communities—and shows why hidden systems and lived memories deserve closer attention.
article / blog
The Seeds We Leave Behind
A reflection on the stories of curiosity, hospitality, and shared humanity that World Cup visitors and hosts will carry home.
article / blog
Brainstorming with AI While Keeping Our Feet on the Ground
A grounded reflection on brainstorming with AI, chasing creative rabbit holes, and keeping human judgment in charge.
article / thought-leadership
The Evolution of AI Engineering - From Prompts to Systems
A plain-language introduction to how AI engineering is evolving from prompts into conversations, context, runtimes, and trustworthy systems.
article / blog
Before You Hand Someone a Hammer
A short PSA about choosing the right tool for the job, and teaching Generative AI through guided, low-stakes practice.
article / blog
The Invitation
A reflection on generative AI as an invitation for broader participation, patient teaching, and community learning.
article / thought-leadership
When Shadow IT Crosses the Control Boundary
A systems-thinking article on how shadow IT, GenAI, and invisible operational dependencies can cross control boundaries before organizations recognize the risk.
article / thought-leadership
Seeing the Race Before the Crash
A systems-thinking article about AI agents entering shared human workflows, why that creates race-condition risk, and why visible risk makes governance possible.
article
The Race Condition with Reality
A systems-thinking article explaining why AI adoption feels chaotic when capability, understanding, governance, resilience, human adaptation, and scale all move at different speeds.
article / blog
The First Typo
A reflection on why AI mistakes should push us toward better literacy, not reflexive dismissal.
article / blog
When the Hallway Stops Talking to the Machine
A reflection on what return-to-office conversations reveal about organizational memory, AI adoption, and the need to leave durable traces of important decisions.
article / thought-leadership
Second Brains, Post Offices, and the Problem of Finding Things
A plain-language explanation of why AI-powered second brains depend on maps, indexes, and human validation to find the right information.
article / blog
Resilience Debt
A reflection on how convenience, efficiency, and automation can quietly remove the alternate paths an organization needs during disruption.
article
Where Second Brains Break
A practical article on stress-testing AI-powered second brains for retrieval, source authority, calibration, and safe operating boundaries.
article / blog
When a Doodle Becomes a Map
A reflection on how a quiet cocktail diagram became a reminder that robustness starts with seeing hidden relationships.
article / blog
Vibe Prompt of the Day: Do We Have Any Tech Debt That We Should Clean Up Before We Continue?
A reflection on using a simple GenAI working prompt to find the kind of technical debt that only becomes obvious after the next step.
article / blog
The SDLC Bottleneck Moved
A reflection on how GenAI may be moving the SDLC bottleneck from implementation effort to validation, ambiguity, and truth boundaries.
article / thought-leadership
The Technical Debt That Confuses GenAI
GenAI can expose the kind of technical debt where business meaning and implementation paths have drifted apart.
article / blog
If Technology Allows Us to Fill Every Empty Minute, How Many Empty Minutes Should Remain Empty?
A reflection on AI-generated briefings, drive-time productivity, and why some empty minutes need to stay empty.
article / thought-leadership
What Risk Engineering Looked Like in 1937, According to Talkie-Box
An experiment with a modern model constrained by an older memory.
article / blog
The New Customer Service Trap
A practical PSA about why confusing customer service channels make scams easier, and why starting from an independently found official channel matters.
article / blog
Blast Radius in the New Technology Race
A reflection on why the new technology race needs blast-radius discipline that keeps people, trust, and survivable forward motion at the center.
article
How to Measure Collaboration Friction in AI-Assisted Work
A practical how-to article on using transcript-based collaboration friction as one measurement tool for improving agentic work environments.
article / blog
Is My Chatbot Getting Better At Connecting Temporal Dots?
A field note on why better chatbot continuity is useful tool improvement, not evidence of inner experience.
article / blog
Shared Principles for Human and AI Collaborators
A field note on using shared operating principles to make human-AI collaboration more trustworthy.
article / thought-leadership
What Anthropic’s Stainless Acquisition Reminds Every Business
A practical reminder that business-critical software dependencies often become utilities before leaders recognize the risk.
article / blog
The Small Ovens of Software
A light reflection on software's oral tradition, lost context, and how GenAI might help preserve the reasoning behind decisions.
article / blog
The Hidden Cost of Token Maxxing
A reflection on how AI-assisted productivity can squeeze the body if we optimize throughput without attention.
article / blog
What To Do When Your Chatbot Personality Goes Flat
A playful field note on preserving a useful chatbot voice when vendor presets change.
article / blog
Where Is the Panic Button?
A practical reflection on why every GenAI user should know how to stop an agent before handing it work.
article / thought-leadership
The Interesting Part Is Not the Idea, It Is the Translation Layer
AI collaboration gets interesting when old patterns are carried into a new working context.
article / thought-leadership
Good Governance Is Not Friction
The fastest teams are not the ones without guardrails. They are the ones with usable roads.
article / thought-leadership
What GenAI Does to the Shape of Software Work
The New Pressure Points
article / thought-leadership
Agile Plus GenAI Has a Race Condition
GenAI can build at machine speed, but humans still validate at human speed.
article
Asking for a Query vs. Asking for Help Designing a Query
Before asking for the implementation, collaborate on the design.
article / blog / case-note
Semantic Debt - When “No One” Becomes Someone
Relearning yesterday's lesson, today: If it looks like an email address, it might act like one.
article / blog
The System Found the Word…
How Semantic Debt Compounds at Machine Speed
article / thought-leadership
Prompts Are Policies, Not Failsafe Switches
The prompt is not the control system that protects us.
article / blog
Chatbots Are Not Witnesses
We should test powerful tools aggressively. We should not mistake those tests for testimony.
article
My Two-Part Strategy for Testing Data Marts
Repeat full runs to detect drift, and write diagnostic queries that validate constraints across the whole set.
article / case-note
Building a Better Human-Bot Collaboration Environment in Obsidian
What it took to turn scattered notes, an AI agent, and a shifting workspace into a collaboration that actually got better over time.
article / blog
Constrained Chaos, Licensed Trust, and Harmful Advice
The law is what it is. Sometimes it even has an internal logic that we can follow, even when we are uneasy about where it leads.
article / blog
The Old Road Is Still Crowded
Sometimes the real barrier to a new technology is the old world it still has to share space with.
article
A Modest Proposal for a Fitter, Freer America
Channeling my inner Jonathan Swift. This is a parody.
article / thought-leadership
AI and the Billable Hour Paradox
How AI Forces Hard Choices Across High‑Skill Professions
article / thought-leadership
AI Reaches Far Beyond Its Users
Like many technologies before it, AI is spreading into more and more of the systems that shape modern life. History reminds us that technologies often become deeply embedded in society long before we fully understand their long-term consequences.
article / thought-leadership
AI Vibe Coding: Faster Doesn’t Mean Better
Speed helps only when the feedback loop can keep up.
article
COALESCE() vs ISNULL() in T-SQL
They solve a similar problem, but their type, nullability, and evaluation rules are different.
article / thought-leadership
Coding Copilots: The Shredding Edge of Innovation
Legacy code gives an AI assistant more than code to read.
article
Field Guide to Surviving Clickbait
A set of habits for keeping your attention and judgment when a headline wants both.
article / thought-leadership
GenAI at Work: A Tool Unlike Its Predecessors
A workplace rollout needs an operating contract, not a generic adoption mandate.
article / thought-leadership
GenAI for the CEO
An executive pilot can teach the organization what trustworthy use actually requires.
article / thought-leadership
GenAI Governance Needs Non-User Participation
Why skeptics, critics, and non-adopters still matter
article / thought-leadership
Harnessing Human Value in an AI-Powered Future
Human roles make AI governance real.
article
How Being Selfish Sometimes Benefits Everyone
In a well-built system, self-interest can help sustain the protections we all rely on.
article / thought-leadership
How LLMs Answer Questions They Were Never Taught
A useful answer is not proof that a chatbot knows, remembers, or has checked the answer.
article
How to Keep Your Prompts from Getting Boring
Ask for genuinely distinct candidates when a first draft keeps returning to the same safe answer.
article / thought-leadership
Learning From the Illusion of Knowing
A convincing response can still be a useful object of investigation.
article / thought-leadership
Managing Emerging Latency Risk
The risk is not just stale information; it is the delay before a validated change reaches real work.
article
Matching Company Names in Excel
Normalize candidates, surface collisions, and keep a human review step before declaring a match.
article
Matching Our Services to Customers
A source-bound AI assistant can prepare a draft service menu; a person still owns the recommendation.
article
Mindfulness Hack: The 45-Second Elevator Speech
A personal writing constraint for when the news has me thinking too fast
article / thought-leadership
Physical AI and Digital Twins
A digital twin earns its name when it remains connected to the physical system it represents
article / thought-leadership
Protecting Privacy During Video Calls
A quick check before a camera brings someone into your home or workspace
article
Protecting the Space Between Disagreement and Contempt
Civic restraint is not passivity; it is what lets reform and pluralism coexist.
article / thought-leadership
Reinforcement Training for Leaders
A satirical thought experiment about attention, incentives, and accountability
article / thought-leadership
Remembering and Organizing our Thoughts: From Conversations to Copilot
Two bounded reflection prompts for personal notes and approved work sources
article / thought-leadership
Rethinking the Enterprise GenAI Rollout
Start with a bounded work problem, then build the support system around it
article / thought-leadership
Robust GenAI Requires Humans (Not the other way around)
Human oversight works when its authority, evidence, and escalation path are explicit
article
Showing Up in the Middle
A small case for making room for dialogue, repair, and better examples
article / thought-leadership
The Culture of Risk
Global teams need shared controls and better questions about local context
article / thought-leadership
The Duplicity We Read Into LLMs
Literature can help us ask better questions about a system that sounds strategic
article
The Fluent Stranger
A small verification habit for systems that speak with easy confidence
article
Keeping Intimate and Everyday AI Conversations Separate
A practical boundary for privacy, tone, and judgment
article
When an AI Conversation Sounds Concerned
Text can signal a need for care without becoming a clinical assessment
article
An AI-Assisted Safety Minute Is Still a Human Briefing
Use a draft to start a conversation, not to certify a workplace
article
The Tempo of Thought
Collaboration needs both speed and places to slow down
article
A Small SQL Server Lesson in AI-Assisted Code
A generated draft still needs a contract, a review, and a test
article
When Copilot Finds What We Left Behind
Content governance becomes more visible when people can ask across the tenant
article
When Your Work AI Gives a Different Answer
The environment, permissions, and task may have changed
article
My Safety Page for Exploring Ideas With AI
A personal practice for curiosity, evidence, and a second perspective
article
Why AI Can Feel Different at Home and at Work
The gap is usually about context, access, and responsibility
article
Why We Chose Hundreds of Pipelines
A field note on restartability, visibility, and a small support team
article
When Personal Data Becomes an Easy Narrative
Privacy risk grows when scattered records can be gathered and made persuasive
article
Conversation, Not Dissertation
A small method for getting beyond the first AI answer
article
April Fool’s Idea—Insuring Virtual Worlds
New policies available 2026 April 1.
article / thought-leadership
AI Threat Surge
How Cybercriminals Are Getting Smarter
article / case-note
Algorithmic Marketing Failure Case Study
The Threads / Meta “School Uniform” Ad Backlash
article
Automated Data Gathering from Public Websites
A Risk Briefing: What you see might not be what the AI sees.
article / thought-leadership
AI as Flammable Cladding
Why Bolted-On Adoption Creates Systemic Risk
article / thought-leadership
AI + Phishing: A Growing Risk
A Case Study – The Smart Recycling Performance Program
article / thought-leadership
AI Adoption by Role
An Enterprise-Wide Reflection
article / thought-leadership
⚠ PSA: Watch Out for GenAI Extras
Not everything needs fine print, and sometimes that fine print can lead to trouble.
article
A Long Overdue Apology
I should have taken the time to get to know more about the people that I have worked with from all over the world. Fortunately, it is not too late to start.
article / thought-leadership
After a Few Conversations with Newly Upgraded Professor Zai…
What happens if the Trump Administration starts using smarter and smarter AIs?
article / thought-leadership
Are You Losing More Arguments Than Usual?
🎙️ A **Public Service Announcement**
article / thought-leadership
A Shadow Is Enough
How Society Might Emerge from Noise
article
A Modest Proposal for Prison Reform
Prioritise restitution and rehabilitation.
article
🚁🇺🇸 CALLING ALL PATRIOTS
DEMAND THE TRUTH ABOUT AREA 51
article / thought-leadership
The Cognitive Capacitor
AI can generate artifacts faster than teams can understand them; the SDLC needs deliberate buffers for shared context, testing, and judgment.
Reflections
6 items
article / blog
Remembering the Grammar We Learned in School
A reflection on why human and AI fluency can look similar while emerging from different relationships with grammar, patterns, and context.
article / blog
Why Giving AI More Context Works
Relevant context helps define an AI task through useful constraints, which makes a fitting answer more likely.
article / blog
What If AI Solves the Great Math Problems?
A short reflection on AI, mathematics, and why human curiosity still matters when machines solve harder problems.
article / blog
The School Board Did Not Just Cancel a Song
A memory piece about school music, rehearsal, and what students lose when adults cancel the arc from chaos to concert.
article / blog
When Your Archive Becomes the Prompt
Why old repository habits can quietly influence AI-assisted coding
article / blog
From All-Hands to AI - The Same Context Problem
The hard problem is not storing more knowledge. It is selecting, compressing, and activating the right context when a decision has to be made.
Reference Desk
1 item
How-To and Practice
1 item