Agents

A recent episode of Latent Space with Joon Sung Park, co-founder of Simile AI, caused a strange flashback to my student days in industrial engineering. Long before anyone talked about generative AI, we learned to use a piece of software called Arena to build probabilistic simulations of airports, supermarkets, factories, and other complex systems. The basic idea was simple and surprisingly powerful. Instead of changing the real system, you built a simplified version of it on a computer. Customers arrived according to some probability distribution. A cashier took a variable amount of time to serve them. Queues formed, resources became occupied and available again. You could add another checkout lane, change the staffing level, or rearrange a production line, run the simulation thousands of times, and see what happened before spending money in the real world. ...

A step by step guide to building a three-agent personal intelligence system that reads your notes, monitors the web, maintains a private wiki, and delivers daily and weekly briefings to your inbox. The thinking behind why I built this is in the companion post: My Personal AI Brain. What you’ll build: A daily email digest grounded in your Obsidian vault and calendar A nightly wiki update that maps your active topics and enriches them with web research A weekly review that closes the week and opens the next one A private, secured website that hosts your living knowledge base Time to set up: 2-3 hours Running cost: $0 (runs on your existing Claude subscription, Resend free tier covers the email volume) Infrastructure: Cowork, Cloudflare (free tier), Obsidian (iCloud sync) ...

Something broke in the last two years. The pace of change in AI alone has reached a frequency that no person can track without a system: new models, new frameworks, new paradigms, new competitive moves. Add to that the normal demands of a senior role: strategy documents, stakeholder alignment, product decisions, customer conversations. Add personal projects. Add family. Add the nagging sense that something important happened while you were handling something else. ...

Gartner published a prediction this week: by 2027, 40% of enterprises will demote or decommission autonomous AI agents due to governance gaps that are only identified after production incidents. The root cause they name at Level 3 of their autonomy framework is approval fatigue. Agents execute actions, writing data, sending communications, and modifying configurations, but only after explicit human approval. Under time pressure, that approval becomes reflexive. The control degrades, and the risk compounds in silence. ...

I have a confession. For the past two years I have been subscribed to more newsletters than I will ever read, following more RSS feeds than I check, and saving more articles than I open. Every morning I sit down with a vague sense that something important happened and I missed it. The problem is not a lack of information. It is too much of it. AI, AI governance, product leadership, agents, MCP, new tools, the space moves fast and the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal. Miss a day and you feel behind. Read everything and you feel buried. There is no good default. ...

Every senior professional I know has the same problem. Too many newsletters. Too many feeds. Too many tabs open. And somehow, despite consuming more information than ever, the feeling that you’re missing the things that actually matter. I built the Personal Executive Briefing Agent to solve this for myself. It runs every night, collects signals from Gmail, RSS feeds, Reddit, and GitHub, scores each item against my actual priorities, and delivers one email every morning with the small number of things that genuinely deserve my attention – and exactly why each one matters to me specifically. ...