53 Years in the Making. A companion reading list to Agents Are Agents (Part 11). The AI agent discourse treats ‘agent’ as if it were coined last year. It wasn’t. 21 papers from Hewitt’s Actor model (1973) through Erlang, BDI, SmartOS, and MCP to Claude Code. The substrate changed. The architecture didn’t.

Part 11 in the series. The AI agent discourse acts like ‘agent’ is a new concept invented by the LLM era. It wasn’t. Erlang called them agents in 1986. The architecture requirements haven’t changed. If an AI agent is a problem in your system, your system has problems.

Part 10 in the series. Previously: Computational Strategy (Part 9), Model Eats Software (Part 8), On Keeping AI in the Critical Path (Part 7), The Confident Incompetence Problem (Part 6), The Disintermediation Principle (Part 5), Zen of Unix Tools (Part 4). You want to build a home. But then you start building a house, which…

Part 9 in a series. Previously: Model Eats the Software (Part 8), The Confident Incompetence Problem (Part 6), Confidence All the Way Down (Part 6b), On Keeping AI in the Critical Path (Part 7), The Disintermediation Principle (Part 5), Zen of Unix Tools (Part 4). The Definition Strategic analysis often ends as a slide deck…

February 24, 2026 Two recent pieces reach different conclusions about AI infrastructure and employment. Citadel Securities published “The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis”, which argues that AI displacement risk is overstated and adoption follows familiar S-curves. Citrini Research published “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, a bear-case scenario in which rapid white-collar displacement reduces consumer spending and…

A case study in why model critique is not verification Originally published at https://the-ai-dialogues.com/commentary/confidence-all-the-way-down I asked a frontier model to represent parts of the United States Constitution in Alloy, SPARK/Ada, and TLA+ and check stated properties with the corresponding tools. The model delivered 1,969 lines: Alloy for relational constraints, SPARK/Ada for contracts, and TLA+ for…

Fluency does not establish applicability Originally published at https://the-ai-dialogues.com/commentary/the-confident-incompetence-problem Models can propose sophisticated systems before they have established that the problem requires them or that the implementation will work. Optimization makes the error easy to see. Ask how to allocate resources under uncertain demand, and a model may immediately recommend a stochastic mixed-integer program, Pyomo,…

Part 8 in the series. Previously: [Zen of Unix Tools], [The Disintermediation Principle], [Keeping AI in the Critical Path]. In August 2011, Marc Andreessen argued that software companies would displace incumbents across much of the economy. The essay captured an important shift, but the companies it named did not all become durable winners. Groupon, Zynga,…

What cheaper cross-referencing changes, and what it does not. Large corpora change the work Law, medicine, software, finance, and science all produce more relevant material than one person can hold in working memory. Experts cope by specializing, searching, sampling, and relying on summaries. Each method can omit a relationship that crosses its chosen boundary. Large-context…

Calling AI a bubble leaves two questions unanswered. Which asset is overpriced, and what event would force its price back toward the cash flows it can produce? At the time of writing, private model companies carry large valuations, Nvidia can gain or lose hundreds of billions of dollars around an earnings report, and infrastructure spending…