The Door in the Hallway: Agentic AI and the Illusion of Control
We used to talk a lot about the concept of a customized, bounded news feed designed to give professionals exactly what they need to know, and nothing they don’t. It was usually called the “Daily Me.”
Lately, I’ve been trying to build a
The May issue of Personal Strategy Compass newsletter is live, picking up in the silence left behind after April’s “acoustic stage” was cleared of its noise and inherited obligations.
If April was about the courage to strip the stage down to its essential signal, May is about the craft required to sustain it.
The
The prevailing narrative I hear in the legal world is that Claude is the “most human” of the LLMs and, especially, a nuanced, sophisticated writer. When I report that the system has begun to fail my specific research protocols, the common response is a suggestion that I am simply using the wrong version and a
The April issue of Personal Strategy Compass is out, and this one took longer to find its frame than most.
The image that finally unlocked it was Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love tour. Not the Born in the USA stadium spectacle that preceded it. The moment after, when he stripped the stage down to almost
When I started posting about AI this year, I did not realize that I was beginning my own version of David Bowie’s Low album.
I use that comparison carefully. Low matters here not as a code book or a track-by-track template, but as an allusion to emergence, fracture, atmosphere, and a break in method that
There are moments in a long AI session when the exchange stops feeling linear.
You are no longer simply asking a question and receiving an answer. You are no longer even refining a prompt in the ordinary sense. Something else begins to happen. Certain phrases return with altered weight. Certain errors recur, but not identically.
Coherence degrades while fluency improves.
The central problem is not that AI systems sometimes fail. Of course they fail. Nor is the main problem that they occasionally hallucinate, wander, or produce obvious nonsense. Those are manageable problems because they announce themselves early. The more interesting and professionally dangerous problem is that a system can become
At a certain point in a long AI session, I can feel the texture change.
The words are still smooth. The tone is still confident. But something underneath has started to slide and give way. The session is still moving forward, yet the logic is no longer holding together in the same way.
That happened
A lot of the most interesting work in legal tech seemed to be coming from people who were newer to the field, earlier in their careers, or just not as widely known yet as
I was in Silicon Valley recently for the initial meeting of the University of Michigan Law School AI Advisory Council. With a little free time around
