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AI, Plainly Explained
Not about any one product — about the mechanism underneath. Understand how it works, and you'll know when to trust it.
6 pieces
AI has become like electricity and running water: invisible while you use it, yet shaping your thinking, your feelings, your judgment, and the outcomes you alone have to live with.
This series doesn’t chase products or headlines. It does one thing: take the mechanism apart. Once you see why it is brilliant, you also see why it makes things up — both come from the same machinery.
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A Plain-English Guide to Leading a Team of Agents
Someone spun up a six-agent team and burned through 40% of a week's quota on day one — three of the bots were re-checking the same pages. 'One agent works great, so a squad must work even better' — most of the time, it doesn't.
#Technology#Agents#Organization
A Plain-English Guide to Working With Agents
A dialog box pops up — 'Agent requests permission to modify 12 files. Allow / Deny' — and your hand is already on Allow. The real question was never how to talk to AI. It's how to work with something that can act on your behalf.
#Technology#Agents#Judgment
A Plain-English Guide to Agents That Can Actually Get Things Done
Same word, 'AI' — so why could last year's version only chat, while this year's takes on the whole job? What decides whether an AI can act usually isn't the chip itself, but the operating system built around it.
#Technology#Agents#AI Safety
A Plain-English Guide to Picking an AI Product
The thing you use every day isn't the model — it's the product. Understanding the six patches bolted onto every chat product is how you pick the right one out of a crowd that all call themselves intelligent.
#Technology#AI Literacy#Large Language Models
A Plain-English Guide to Talking to AI Well
Talking to an AI is nothing like using a search box. Four moves — Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence — turn a prompt into a working division of labour.
#Technology#AI Literacy#The 4D Framework
A Plain-English Guide to Large Language Models
An LLM's brilliance and its confident nonsense come from the same mechanism. Take the six steps apart and you can see exactly how a sentence gets generated.
#Technology#AI Literacy#Large Language Models
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