AI Swarms and the Myth of the Online Public Square

A new paper warns that AI bot swarms threaten democracy by manufacturing ‘false consensus.’ The problem: social media was never a meaningful proxy for public opinion. You can’t corrupt a signal that was never there.

The AI Plumbing That Actually Matters

While everyone argues about AGI timelines, Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol quietly became industry standard. One of these things changes what you build. The other is trivia.

AI Agents: The Gap Between Keynotes and Reality

Every tech keynote features AI agents that autonomously handle complex tasks. The demos are impressive. The reality is different - and that’s actually fine, once you calibrate your expectations.

AI Doesn’t Fix Bad Taste

Building things is easier than ever. Knowing what’s worth building isn’t. The bottleneck shifted from execution to judgment, and that’s a harder problem to solve.

Prompt Engineering Is Just Requirements Gathering

The skill that actually matters with AI tools isn’t clever prompting tricks. It’s the same boring skill that’s always separated useful projects from disasters: knowing what you want and being able to say it clearly.