Insights

Field notes from AI activation

Original essays on what actually happens when teams adopt AI — the methodology behind the AI Activation Sprint, written from the workshop floor, not the keynote stage.

AI activation workshop, with a team gathered around a wall of sticky notes

AI Adoption • 12 Sept 2025 • EN

5 counter-intuitive lessons from AI training and coaching

Five lessons from supporting dozens of teams through AI activation: the opposite of what the market keeps promising.

Inverted diagram representing a change of perspective

Team Dynamics • 21 Aug 2025 • EN

What if we held AI upside down?

A reversal of perspective: what if AI is not a tool to master, but a mirror that reveals our cognitive blind spots?

Team diagram with human-AI connections layered on top

Team Dynamics • 30 Jul 2025 • EN

Does AI force us to rethink how teams work?

When every member of a team has a copilot, roles, rituals, and work distribution begin to deform. How do we recompose them?

Diagram showing a context window filling up with conversation tokens

AI Literacy • 2 Oct 2025 • EN

When should you start a new AI chat, and when should you continue?

The context window is a finite resource. Knowing when to reset and when to carry on is one of the highest-leverage skills in AI literacy.

Magnifying glass over a paragraph of generated text

AI Literacy • 18 Sept 2025 • EN

How to spot a hallucination before it spots you

Five practical tells that an AI answer is fabricated, written for non-technical readers who want to trust their tools without being burned by them.

Schematic of attention weights distributed across a sentence

AI Literacy • 4 Sept 2025 • EN

Why the way you write your prompt changes everything

A non-technical deep-dive into attention, context, and why the same model gives radically different answers to almost-identical questions.

Comparison of token counts across English, French, and Mandarin for the same sentence

AI Literacy • 12 Aug 2025 • EN

Not all languages are equal for AI

Tokenization is not neutral. French costs more tokens than English for the same idea, and that has direct consequences for cost, latency, and quality.

Diagram of a RAG pipeline, from source document to user query

Technical • 25 Jun 2025 • EN

Document preparation: the key performance factor in RAG systems

In a RAG project, 80% of final quality is decided before the model: in how sources are cleaned, segmented, and indexed.

Comparison table of the strengths and weaknesses of three AI models

Commentary • 30 May 2025 • EN

Grok 3, O3, and Claude 4: an in-depth face-off

A methodical comparison of three frontier models on real intellectual work tasks: not a benchmark, but field use.

Chart from the Meeker 2025 report on AI adoption

Commentary • 15 May 2025 • EN

Mary Meeker's 2025 AI Report: what to take away

A selective reading of the 340-page report: three charts that really matter, and one blind spot worth naming.

Stylized Swiss army knife, used as a metaphor for professional versatility

Commentary • 22 Apr 2025 • EN

The total developer, or the age of versatility

An adaptation and commentary on Justin Searls' essay about the announced disappearance of rigid specialization in software work.