Field reports, case studies, and practitioner guides — written for the classroom, not the feed.
PracticeClone it, install it editable, run the offline example, then read the 67-symbol API you'd actually build on. A working agent in about fifteen minutes, no API key required.
Rod Rivera
Install a real open-source framework, subclass one class, and run it. Then break it on purpose two different ways, because a tool you have not watched fail is a tool you do not understand yet.
Install the zeo CLI, write a real Statement of Work, and hit the exact schema error a beginner hits first. This is the tool this site's own governance arguments run on.
Ronald Coase asked in 1937 why firms exist instead of markets. AI agents revive the question — and the old answer says the firm concentrates, not dissolves.
Anthropic measured it: users approve about 93% of permission prompts. A gate that opens 93% of the time is a doorbell. Here is what the permission system actually enforces, what it cannot, and the standing rules worth adopting before you delegate anything that matters.
Every business has one: the customer list that lives half in a spreadsheet, half in an inbox, and half in someone's head. Here is how to clean it in about twenty minutes, and — the part nobody teaches — how to prove the cleaning did not quietly drop forty rows.
What does one unit of agent work cost? German cost accounting spent a century proving that is not one question but several — and that answering the wrong one kills good business. Here is the version that matters when your workers are metered by the token and your scarcest input is your own attention.
Your lunch break has a token price. The model remembers nothing between turns, so every request re-sends the whole conversation — which means cost scales with context carried, not work requested. Here is the cost function, the dials that matter, and the ledger line worth keeping.
An agent that reads your files and runs your commands is not a faster autocomplete. It moves the bottleneck in your working day from doing the work to checking it — and almost nobody has built for that. This is the argument the rest of this site rests on.
In a randomised controlled trial, experienced developers using AI tools took 19% longer on real issues — while believing they had been 20% faster. Delegation instinct is measurably wrong, so the decision needs two questions instead: can the check be run by the machine, and how cheaply can the damage be undone.
Kill your session mid-task. If the work cannot resume from what is on disk, you were running on chat-as-state and merely hadn't crashed yet. This is what changes when the harness stops being a tool you use and becomes an operation you run.
A working reference for the eleven content blocks this site can render. Each one is shown live and paired with the case it is for. If a block below looks broken, it is broken.
A Zero-Employee Organization is a firm where headcount is no longer the unit of scale. Here is the definition, the eleven-theory audit behind it, and the finding that only four verdicts survived being checked three times.
13 entries in this issue
Cookie duty
The one he did not eat is a measurement cookie. Say yes and the site loads Google Analytics (GA4), which stores an identifier in your browser and lets us count which lessons get read.
Change your mind any time with Privacy choices in the footer. Read the Privacy Policy
Optional · newsletter
That is saved and settled. Separately, and this is marketing rather than measurement: Rod writes a weekly email — one lesson, one field note — sent through Kit. It has nothing to do with cookies, and skipping it costs you nothing.
We will send a confirmation email. Click the link in it and the next lesson finds you.
