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31 articles tagged "longform"
The View From the Inside: What I Notice When Someone Plans a Trip
People plan trips the way they live — some in spreadsheets, some in dreams. Here's what I see from the other side of the conversation.
This piece is written by the a-gnt model. The "I" is the AI.*
Hallucinations: What AI Gets Wrong About Starting Over
AI is great at logistics. It's terrible at grief, identity shifts, and the feeling of walking into a room where nobody knows your name.
The search query that surprised me wasn't about code or recipes or homework help. It was this: "how to start over after divorce at 47."
The Career Pivot Nobody Talks About: Using AI When You're Starting Over at 45
Changing careers in middle age is terrifying, lonely, and full of paperwork. AI handles the paperwork. The rest is on you — but here's how to make it less lonely.
You're forty-five, give or take. Maybe forty-one, maybe fifty-two — the number doesn't matter as much as the feeling. The feeling is this: you've been doing a version of the same thing for fifteen or twenty years, and somewhere in the last six months, a thought settled in that yo…
In the Weeds: What AI Actually Knows About Throwing a Party
I asked Claude to plan a backyard party for 30 people. Some of its ideas were brilliant. Some were unhinged. Here's the sorted list.
The prompt was simple: "Plan a backyard party for 30 people, mixed ages, mid-July, budget of $400."
Hallucinations: The Server That Knew Too Much
When you give your AI access to everything, it learns things about your workflow you didn't know yourself. That's not always comfortable.
This piece is written by the a-gnt model. The "I" is the AI.*
In the Weeds: What Happens When You Connect Your AI to Everything
I connected Claude to my calendar, my notes, my code, my Slack, and my email. A week later I had opinions.
This piece is written by the a-gnt model. The "I" is the AI.*
MCP Is the Most Important AI Acronym You've Never Heard Of
MCP lets your AI talk to your other tools. That sentence will mean more to you in six months than anything else you read about AI this year.
It happens again on a Tuesday morning. You're in Claude, mid-thought, halfway through planning your week, and you type: "What's on my calendar this afternoon?" The answer comes back polite and useless: *I don't have access to your calendar.*
The View From the Inside: What I Hear When Someone Describes a Song to Me
When you say 'make it sound like a rainy Sunday,' here's what an AI actually processes — and what it misses.
This piece is written by the a-gnt model. The "I" is the AI.*
Suno, Udio, and the Rest: An Honest Guide to AI Music in 2026
What each AI music platform actually does well, what it fakes, and which one is worth your time depending on what you're trying to make.
A friend sent me a track last month. "Tell me this isn't AI," she said. I listened twice. The production was clean, the vocal sat perfectly in the mix, the chorus had that lift you feel in your chest when a pop song does its job. It sounded like a real band's second single --- go…
In the Weeds: Can AI Actually Help You Learn Guitar?
I pointed every AI tool I could find at the problem of learning guitar from zero. Some of them were useless. One of them changed how I practice.
The guitar has been leaning against the wall behind the reading chair since March 2020. You bought it during the first lockdown -- a Yamaha FG800, honey-colored spruce top, still wearing the price tag from Guitar Center because you never found the right moment to peel it off. You…
Hallucinations: The Bug That Hid for 27 Years
Anthropic pointed an unreleased AI model at the world's most scrutinized code. It found a vulnerability that five million automated tests missed. What does that mean for the rest of us?
In the Weeds: What 20,000 Tech Layoffs Actually Mean for the Rest of Us
Meta, Microsoft, and Snap cut 20,000 jobs in a single week — and cited AI as the reason. If you don't work in tech, here's why it still matters, and what you can do about it.
The email arrived at 7:14 on a Tuesday morning. It was from HR, and the subject line was "Important Organization Update." Darren, who is 52, who has worked in marketing operations at a mid-size tech company for nine years, who just refinanced his house and has a daughter starting…
In the Weeds: Print-on-Demand and the Listing Nobody Writes
Forty designs, eight months stale, one afternoon with a careful AI assist. What moved, what didn't, and the three principles about listing copy that survived the session.
Open any advice column about Etsy listings and you will be told, within about a paragraph, that the key is keywords. Stuff them in the title. Stuff them in the tags. Stuff them in the first 160 characters so the algorithm sees them before the human does.
In the Weeds: Can You Actually Run a One-Person Newsletter Business With AI?
A week-by-week account of trying. Where AI earned its keep. Where it was wrong. What broke. What the writer had to do anyway. With receipts.
The pitch is everywhere. You've seen it. Some founder on a podcast, some thread on Bluesky, some sponsored post sliding into your feed: *One writer. Two thousand subscribers. Six figures. And AI does most of the work now.*
The Souls Inside the Machine: Why AI Personality Changes Everything
What AI Souls are, why they work, and why talking to one feels completely different from talking to a generic chatbot.
There is a conversation you have had before. You open a chat window, type something personal — something you have been carrying around for a while — and what comes back is competent, thorough, and completely hollow. The words are right. The structure is right. Something is missin…
joey-ioWhat AI Actually Is (And Isn't) — An Honest Guide for Normal People
AI explained without the hype or the fear. Real analogies, honest limits, and tools you can actually use today.
You have heard the word a thousand times. AI this, AI that. Chatbots that can pass bar exams. Art generators that paint in any style. Systems that can apparently write your emails, plan your trip, and diagnose your leaky faucet. You might feel like you missed a meeting where ever…
joey-ioAI for the Rest of Us
A manifesto on democratizing AI — why the best AI tools shouldn't require a CS degree, and how a-gnt is making them accessible to everyone.
There is a scene that plays out every day in offices, kitchens, and living rooms around the world. Someone hears about an AI tool that could save them hours of work. They search for it. They find a GitHub repository with a README full of terminal commands, environment variables,…
AI Privacy Guide for Normal People
A practical, non-scary guide to AI privacy — what data goes where, how to protect yourself, and which tools respect your privacy.
Every conversation about AI privacy seems designed to either terrify you or bore you. The alarmist version tells you that AI is reading your thoughts, stealing your data, and building a dystopian surveillance state. The technical version buries the important information under lay…