Month: September 2026
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The Steinway System
In New York in 1919 a young copywriter working at N.W. Ayer was handed an account that few others in the agency wanted to work on. The copywriter, Raymond Rubicam, was asked to write three full page magazine advertisements for Steinway & Sons. The piano maker had long thought that advertising was somewhat beneath them.…
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Cognitive Surrender
Helen Edwards from the Artificiality Institute tells the story of the researcher who, before LLMs came along, read every transcript of every interview he had ever done. He handed that job to an AI and then mid-presentation he had to stop because he realised that he couldn’t speak to any of it. The analysis might have been…
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Decision-making under pressure
Early morning on the 16th October 1962 and US National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy has just handed a folder of photographs to President John F. Kennedy. Inside were pictures taken by a U-2 plane that had flown over Western Cuba two days earlier. Analysts who had studied the pictures believed that they showed launch sites…
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Thinking (and working) in loops
In early June Peter Steinberger, the developer behind OpenClaw, posted (on X, but I’m not linking to X) something which seems to have changed a lot of influential people’s approaches to working with AI. ‘Here’s your monthly reminder’, he said, ‘that you shouldn’t be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt…