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317 posts · showing 171–180
2026
10 posts-
Novel Problems vs Recombined Ones: The Line That Matters
On genuinely novel problems you don't get an error — you get the nearest known pattern applied confidently to an adjacent problem. One classification decides where your attention belongs.
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Negotiation, Politics, and the Work That Isn't in the Ticket
It's usually called politics, said with distaste, and treated as the tax on real work. It's also the growing share of the job — and most of it is information flow and reliability rather than manipulation.
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When the Requirement Itself Is Wrong, Who Notices?
The behavior was intentional, decided two years ago, documented somewhere nobody looked. Every stage faithfully executed a wrong ticket — and every automated check confirmed it, by construction.
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Ambiguity Resolution Stays a Human Job for a While
An agent doesn't fail on ambiguity — it absorbs it, picks a reading, and produces a confident answer to a question nobody asked. Better models guess better; they don't guess less.
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The Meeting an Agent Can't Attend
Requirements aren't transmitted in those rooms, they're constructed — out of inputs that exist nowhere beforehand and mostly aren't recorded after. And the efficiency instinct cuts exactly the wrong thing.
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Why Agents Struggle Where There's No Feedback Signal
Coding agents work well because compilers exist, not because code is easy. Effectiveness tracks whether a domain has a fast, independent, specific verdict — and that's frequently something you can build.
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Accountability Cannot Be Delegated to a Model
"The agent decided" answers nothing — not legally, not organizationally, not to the person affected. What accountability actually requires has design consequences, including why a rubber-stamp gate is worse than none.
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Taste Is a Bottleneck: Where Judgment Has No Substitute Yet
Cheap generation doesn't reduce the value of judgment — it makes discrimination the scarce step. And it introduces a hazard: well-argued cases for mediocre options, which is what agents produce uniformly.
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The Failure Modes That Don't Improve With Scale
Most agent limitations improve with the models. A smaller set won't, because the constraint isn't the model — and building elaborate workarounds for one while waiting out the other gets both wrong.
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The SDLC Steps That Resist Automation Longest, and Why
Order the lifecycle by automatability and it doesn't track difficulty at all. Two properties decide it — and the steps that resist are short, frequent, and where all the leverage sits.