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Short essays on attention, systems, and the kind of work that holds up in the agentic era. Written slowly, on purpose.
A working agent is a model, a loop, and a few hundred lines of code. Almost everything that separates a good agent from a frustrating one lives in the structure around the model, and that structure finally has a name.
The screen is full, the answer is plausible, and your hand reaches for the phone. That reflex is not a coincidence. It is the most expensive habit of our time.
Most diagrams assume the boxes do not have opinions. Recent research on how agents actually behave inside real systems suggests the boxes have plenty.
When the shallow part of the job costs nothing, the deep part is suddenly the only thing worth being paid for. The research suggests that part is also getting harder to do.