· 4 min read
Difficulty-Aware Prompting: When Chain-of-Thought Hurts
Reasoning depth should scale with task difficulty. Here's when chain-of-thought helps, when it hurts, and how to spend reasoning tokens wisely.
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· 4 min read
Prompting Is Becoming Spec-Writing
The clever one-liner prompt is fading. Durable AI work needs specifications: constraints, examples, and acceptance criteria you can reuse.
· 4 min read
AI Workflows vs. AI Agents: When to Use Which
A decision framework for choosing constrained AI workflows over open-ended agents — and the specific conditions that justify going agentic.
· 5 min read
Evaluating AI Output When There's No Right Answer
How to build evals for subjective knowledge work — emails, summaries, docs — using rubrics, pairwise comparison, and human-in-the-loop sampling.
· 4 min read
Why Most RAG Pipelines Fail at Retrieval, Not Generation
When a RAG pipeline gives bad answers, the LLM usually isn't the problem. Retrieval is. Here's where chunking, ranking, and recall actually break.
· 4 min read
Evaluating AI Agents: Why Task Success Beats Benchmarks
Public leaderboards reward the wrong things for agentic work. Here's a practical eval harness built around real task completion and side-effect safety.
· 4 min read
Spreadsheets as Tool Use: Letting LLMs Compute, Not Guess
Why LLMs should generate and execute formulas instead of hallucinating math — plus concrete patterns for verifiable spreadsheet automation.
· 4 min read
The Inbox Is the Hardest Agent Problem in Productivity
Email looks routine, but it's the toughest environment for autonomy: ambiguous intent, irreversible sends, and tangled threading state. Here's what reliable inbox automation really takes.
· 4 min read
Context Windows Are Cheap, Attention Is Not
Stuffing a million tokens into a prompt degrades reasoning more than it helps. The real skill is curating what the model actually attends to.
· 5 min read
RAG vs. Long Context: When to Retrieve and When to Stuff
A practical decision framework for choosing retrieval, full-context, or hybrid approaches based on data volatility, cost, and accuracy.
· 4 min read
Inbox Zero Is Obsolete: Triage for an Agent-Run Inbox
When agents read and draft your email, success isn't an empty inbox — it's well-designed triage rules, escalation thresholds, and approval boundaries.
· 4 min read
Why Your Inbox Is the Best RAG Corpus You Already Own
Email threads encode decisions, commitments, and relationships better than any wiki — making your inbox the highest-signal grounding source for an AI assistant.
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