Position
Narrow Made Sense When Connecting Things Was Expensive
AI makes specialist knowledge cheap, so the people and firms that win from here are the ones who can see a whole system, close its loops and prove what it does.
The Journal of Intellectual Frontiers
We share our research, what it showed, and what evidence it produced. We publish our own work, but we welcome partners and community members to join us too.
16items this quarter · Autumn 202611papers44programs138notes3positions, all open0corrections32essays, referenced
We've been creating for a while: patents filed since 2002, marks in use since 1998, papers in journals since 2022, essays since 2022, posts since 2024. Our clients include the U.S. Federal Government and their Prime Contractors, Fortune 500, non-profits and many others.
Autumn 2026
What we've learned this quarter.
Vol. 1 · No. 4 · Autumn 2026Use case
A clinician can see exactly how a study defined its outcome
A clinician deciding whether a study applies to their patients needs the exact definitions behind its conclusion: what counted as treatment response, which patients were left out, which thresholds were used. A companion repository shows them in the code that ran, with the data dictionary, and later releases show whether the finding held on new patients.
Pattern
A companion repository takes seven steps to set up
Setting up a companion code repository takes seven steps, and most research groups can do the first five in an afternoon once the analysis is finished. The steps go from storing the data in the right place to making the code rerun on new data, and the last one, automated checking, is optional.
Use case
A diligence team can rerun a finding before licensing it
Before a company licenses a biomarker, invests in a device or builds on a published result, its diligence team can rerun the analysis behind the finding. A companion repository, public or shared privately under an agreement, turns a judgment about the authors into a check of the method.
Use case
A funder can ask for a rerun before renewing a grant
A funder or program officer deciding whether to renew a grant usually reads the progress report and the papers. With companion repositories, the funder can also see the actual analysis pipelines, compare methods across the grants in a portfolio, and ask for a rerun of the result the renewal depends on.
Use case
A journal can give reviewers a rerun report with each submission
A journal editor can ask authors to submit a companion repository with the paper, run automated checks and a rerun before review, and hand reviewers a short report: what ran, what matched the paper's numbers, and what was flagged. Reviewers spend their time on the science, and the journal can mark papers whose results rerun.
Pattern
A private repository lets a reviewer rerun code that can't be public
Code that can't be public, because of a patent plan, a contract or commercial value, can still be checked. Keep the companion repository private and invite the editor, the reviewers or the funder you choose. Software companies protect their code this way every day.
Theory
A result anyone can rerun counts for more than a famous name
When evidence is thin or can't be checked, medicine leans on who said it: the senior author, the famous journal, the expert panel. When anyone can rerun the analysis and test it on new data, the question shifts from who said it to what the evidence keeps showing.
Use case
A research group can answer reviewers by pointing to code that runs
A research team can publish a companion repository with its paper. When a reviewer asks how a number was produced, the answer is a release that reruns it. The team gets a citable software record, a precise history of every analysis decision, and a way to update the method as new data arrives.
Theory
Check reproducibility with rules first, a model second and a person last
Most peer reviewers can't spend days rebuilding an analysis. Automation can take that load, but only if it's built in the right order: rules that a program checks without judgment first, a model only for what rules can't answer, and a person last. A higher layer never overrules a lower one.
Pattern
Patient data stays governed and the code goes beside the paper
Split a study's materials by risk: data about individual patients goes to a repository built to control access to it, and everything else, the code, the metadata and any data with no patients in it, goes in the companion repository beside the paper. The split puts the governance burden only where the risk is.
Pattern
A spreadsheet analysis can be a companion repository
Many published analyses were done in a spreadsheet, not in code. That's fine: a spreadsheet with its formulas intact, its data in open formats and a short README that says the order of the steps is a companion repository too.
Theory
Versioned releases keep the evidence current while the paper stays fixed
A published paper is a snapshot. A companion repository can keep going: each time the same method runs on new real-world data, the authors publish a new release with its own DOI, and the release the paper cites never changes. Peer review keeps its job, and readers can see whether a finding still holds.
Working paper
AI-Prepared Dashboards Add Data Faster Than People Can Decide
This paper argues that AI-prepared dashboards and digests add information faster than people can act on it, and proposes a Decisions & NBA Board: a short queue of decisions, each with cited evidence, options, an owner with authority and a dated check on the result. It matters because a report that changes no decision is a cost. No hypothesis has been tested.
Working paper
Communicating Engineering Team Effectiveness to Executive Peers
This paper proposes a field-testable operating model for CTOs: one traceable evidence base that executive peers can inspect for their own jobs without relying on the CTO's persuasion. It matters because senior leaders often judge engineering by remembered incidents and impressions. The six hypotheses have not been tested.
Working paper
Unleash DD214 as the Olive Button
This paper proposes Olive Button, a Blue Button-style FHIR implementation pattern for DD214 service data that helps meet the 30-, 120-, and 180-day mandates of Executive Order 14426 using existing systems and standards. It matters because the order now requires records sharing at separation. The FHIR mapping is an implementation hypothesis, and the order does not mandate FHIR.
What we've been working on these days
All topics →If you're not seeing something you're interested in, reach out and tell us what we're missing.
Alpha to Patent
Open the programProgram
Design Your Patent Around What the Customer Buys
This program shows how to begin patent strategy with the result a customer values rather than the thing the inventor built. It then looks for the unusual insight and the constraint a capable competitor cannot avoid without weakening that result. It matters because the commercially important boundary sits where avoiding the patent raises cost, delay, or risk the customer notices.
Program
From Product to Rights
This program shows how to move from a product to the rights that protect it. Break the product into the assets that create value, then use the narrowest controls that can do a real commercial job, whether patent, secret, contract, data right, publication, or mark. It matters because a first product can disappear while the underlying principle stays useful.
Program
IP in a World of Abundant Intelligence
This program asks which parts of an advantage remain scarce when capable models and competent software are widely available. Assume intelligence, research, and engineering keep getting cheaper, and protect the parts of an advantage that remain scarce under that assumption. It matters because today's implementation difficulty should not be mistaken for a durable advantage.
Program
Patent to Alpha
This program shows how to read an existing patent backward to recover the unusual insight, current use, product opportunity, and decision the right can still change. Its test is what commercial choice becomes better because the right exists. It matters because a promising theme does not cure an unclear chain of title or an expired right.
Companion Executable Code Repositories
Open the programDecisions & NBA Board: from AI-prepared dashboards to decisions that change outcomes
Open the programWorking paper
AI-Prepared Dashboards Add Data Faster Than People Can Decide
This paper argues that AI-prepared dashboards and digests add information faster than people can act on it, and proposes a Decisions & NBA Board: a short queue of decisions, each with cited evidence, options, an owner with authority and a dated check on the result. It matters because a report that changes no decision is a cost. No hypothesis has been tested.
Early access
Engineering Care Delivery
Open the programProgram
Business Model Innovation
Healthcare is unusually intermediated: an innovation reaches a patient through physicians, hospitals, distributors, DME suppliers, pharmacies, PBMs, payers, employers, purchasing organisations and government programs, and each of them controls a different part of the money, workflow, reimbursement or risk. This program studies who must approve, prescribe, purchase, distribute, implement, bill for, bear risk for and profit from an innovation, and whether each intermediary should be retained, bypassed, replaced, consolidated, automated, partnered with or become the product itself.
Program
Care Delivery as the Product
This program treats care delivery as the product. Drugs, devices, diagnostics, software, monitoring, AI, and human judgment are components of a care pathway that is specified, tested, owned, and improved against a patient outcome. It matters because value may move toward access, authority, workflow control, and measured outcomes as technical components become easier to produce.
Program
Consumer tech for medical grade devices
Zero Neo says new software should be the last resort when you already own the platform. The same question applies to hardware. Consumer electronics has already commoditized most of the sensing, compute, radio, and power a large class of medical devices needs. If that is true, and if AI-native methods can compress the regulatory and quality work, then some reimbursed devices are priced as though neither change happened.
Program
Continuous Care Orchestration
Care-management software built as a system of record with alerting attached cannot be configured into a judgment system. The binding constraint has moved from data capture to judgment at scale: deciding hour by hour, across thousands of patients, which small signals deserve a person's attention today. This program studies the architecture, safety model, economics and adoption path of systems that reason continuously about care work while it is happening, covering graduated machine autonomy, evidence and provenance as first-class artifacts, simulation as an operating tool, program-fit reasoning across CCM, APCM, PCM, RPM, RTM, TCM and AWV, and migration away from incumbent platforms.
Program
Evidence, Economics, and Rights
This program sets out the evidence, economics, rights, and decision rules that make a care model worth pursuing and safe to sustain. A care model can advance only when its scientific, market, adoption, economic, and strategic claims survive separate review, because strength in one track cannot erase a fatal weakness in another.
Program
Intermediation in Healthcare Delivery
Healthcare is unusually intermediated. Between an innovation and the patient sit physicians, hospitals, distributors, DME suppliers, pharmacies, PBMs, payers, employers, purchasing organizations and government programs, and each of them controls a different part of the money, the workflow, the risk or the door. This program treats that structure as something to be mapped and redesigned rather than accepted.
Program
Market and System Conditioning
A useful intervention moves through the health system and stays in routine use only when the conditions around it change. Useful interventions stall when patients cannot be found, clinicians cannot act, institutions cannot absorb the change, or payment and accountability remain unsettled. The least ready essential condition can hold the whole path back.
Program
Public Signal Intelligence
This program shows how public records can expose spending, unmet need, scientific movement, delivery capacity, policy experiments, regulated products, and the gaps between them. It asks which public signals can support a timely decision without claiming that incomplete data proves more than it does. Public data should guide investigation, not decorate a market-size claim.
Program
The Competitor May Look Like Your Customer
A regulated technology business may find that its next competitor is not another vendor but the practice it has been selling to, rebuilt around AI as an operating company.
Program
Therapeutic Enablement
A therapy, device, or diagnostic succeeds only when the patient, care team, and delivery setting are ready to carry its clinical capability into a reliable result.
Program
Zero Dashboard Experiences
The dashboard is an artifact of software that could not reason. When a system can rank, explain and justify, the correct interface is a briefing, a ranked stream of judgment calls and a conversational explorer, not KPI tiles, module sidebars and worklists. The briefing, the ranked stream and the explorer replace the dashboard, and giving one up has a cost that can be counted.
Evidence Credibility Engineering
Open the programImpossible Work
Open the programProgram
Which entirely new forms of work become possible with modern AI?
AI matters most where it makes useful work economical for the first time. Past the faster versions of familiar jobs lies work, and products, services and organizational capabilities, that humans could not afford to perform continuously before.
Precision Education
Open the programProgram
Human knowledge as a closed loop
Training is treated as a broadcast: publish the course, record the completion, hope for the change. We treat human knowledge as a control loop instead, where every step from delivery to outcome produces evidence and the evidence decides what the person gets next.
Procurement Innovation
Open the programProgram
Government Should Stop Doing All Its Own Buying
Government should keep every acquisition function that requires public authority and test different ways to perform the commercial support work underneath it. This is not privatization. It is a way to find out what works.
Unbundling Work
Open the programProgram
AI Workforce™, Native Alpha™, and Recomposition
Native Alpha™ is the unusual capability of a person or organisation that materially changes an accepted outcome, and that ordinary peers with ordinary tools and AI cannot reproduce. Recomposition is dividing work again so that capability is spent where it matters. The goal is a working operation in which people, machines, software, and outside services each carry the work they can perform well and lawfully.
Program
Eidolons: working digital reflections
We hand capable engines important work and then hand them a thin description of the people, companies, customers, competitors, products, and systems the work is about. An Eidolon is a working digital reflection of one of those things: not a replica, not a clone, but enough grounded reality for an AI to reason about the original without guessing.
Program
Labor as Code™
Labor as Code™ is the practice of writing a unit of work down (its purpose, evidence, authority, limits, exceptions, and tests) precisely enough that it can be assigned to a person or a machine and then inspected and changed. Work becomes governable when its purpose, evidence, authority, limits, exceptions, and tests are written clearly enough to inspect and change.
Program
Operational Truth™, Risk, Liability, and Outcomes
This program asks how an organization can know that its mixed workforce acts on reliable evidence and produces acceptable outcomes. Consequential work needs evidence of what happened, clear limits on authority, known failure modes, and a test tied to the result in the world. It matters because a completed field can be well formed and still be wrong.
Program
Unbundling Work, Credentials, and Liability
A job title bundles work, authority, trust, evidence, and liability. Open the bundle before deciding what should move and what must stay with a person.
Zero Neo
Open the programProgram
Zero Neo
Zero Neo is a research program on one position: a small or midsize business should buy no new software for an operation when the platforms it already owns, its systems of record, and AI already do the job. New software for business operations should be the last resort if Microsoft 365 or Google platforms are already good enough. Zero Neo is the program that tests whether AI has made that position defensible, and looks for the places where it is wrong.
Zero Security Theatre
Open the programProgram
AI-native defensive security
AI makes some attacks cheaper and gives defenders more ways to watch systems continuously. This program asks which neglected defensive jobs machines can now do, and which decisions still need a person.
Program
Attack-and-recovery engineering
Engineering disciplines specify an outcome, instrument the system, attack the assumption, measure what happens, and improve. This program applies that sequence to cyber resilience and collects the evidence needed before any composite score can honestly be defined.
Program
Compliant Insecurity
Compliant Insecurity is the condition of an organisation that holds every certificate its market asks for and still cannot detect, contain, or recover from an ordinary intrusion. This program studies how regulatory and contractual obligations move from periodic attestation to continuous operational evidence.
Program
GRC engineering
Governance, risk, and compliance teams write policies, maintain spreadsheets, collect screenshots, and answer questionnaires. This program asks how much of that evidence the systems themselves can produce.
Program
Human error without human blame
A large part of security practice asks employees to remember instructions and behave correctly under time pressure. This program studies what happens when that expectation is replaced with technical arrangements that make the safe action the default.
Program
Recovery as a first-class discipline
Prevention attracts budget and attention. Recovery is usually delegated to infrastructure, measured by job success, and rehearsed rarely. This program studies whether recovery capability is systematically underinvested relative to its effect on total loss.
Program
The dangers of data privacy theatre
Most privacy programs are documentary. Notices, consent language, contractual clauses, and a data inventory maintained by interview. This program studies privacy as an engineered property of running systems, where the claim in the notice can be checked against the behaviour of the data.
Program
The dangers of security theatre
Security programs are usually described by what they have: purchased tools, signed policies, closed findings, and certificates. That says almost nothing about what would happen if a capable attacker tried something today. This program tests the controls and measures what happens.
Program
Vendor and supply-chain resilience
Other organisations hold much of a company's security in their hands: managed providers, cloud platforms, software vendors, clinical systems, contractors, open-source maintainers, and AI providers. This program asks what those parties actually do when trouble starts.
Awaiting a section
Papers whose record names no research area yetWorking paper
Communicating Engineering Team Effectiveness to Executive Peers
This paper proposes a field-testable operating model for CTOs: one traceable evidence base that executive peers can inspect for their own jobs without relying on the CTO's persuasion. It matters because senior leaders often judge engineering by remembered incidents and impressions. The six hypotheses have not been tested.
Early access
Working paper
Unleash DD214 as the Olive Button
This paper proposes Olive Button, a Blue Button-style FHIR implementation pattern for DD214 service data that helps meet the 30-, 120-, and 180-day mandates of Executive Order 14426 using existing systems and standards. It matters because the order now requires records sharing at separation. The FHIR mapping is an implementation hypothesis, and the order does not mandate FHIR.
Early access
Landscape review
Plan EHR Integrations in Months, and Help Your Customers Shorten the Wait
This landscape review tells digital health executives how long an EHR integration takes and what shortens the wait. It gives a planning range of six to twelve months from kickoff to first customer live, most of it spent on customer and EHR-vendor steps rather than code. The range is a judgment from public sources, not a measured median.
Early access
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
Biotech commercialization should be treated as an engineering discipline
An editorial arguing that biotech commercialization should be run the way engineering is run, with specifications, measurement, and repeatable process, rather than treated as a series of one-off translational events. The piece is indexed under artificial intelligence, biotechnology, commercializatio
Journal of Translational Medicine
Integrating trust into artificial intelligence for medicine: using diabetes as the exemplar disease
Patients, clinicians, administrators, regulators, and AI developers each need a reason to trust medical AI, and diabetes shows what that takes. Trust requires moving beyond single deterministic outputs to clear standards for medical AI provenance and performance, with each stakeholder holding its ow
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
Research Code Sharing in Support of Gold Standard Science
This article argues that sharing research code in an open access, version-controlled repository benefits science and individual researchers, and aligns with the NIH Gold Standard Science program and the FAIR and TRUST principles. Pairing a cited data snapshot with a versioned code release lets reade
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
Continuous Glucose Monitoring Data Analysis 2.0: Functional Data Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence Applications
This article reviews new methods of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data analysis, called CGM Data Analysis 2.0, that use functional data analysis and artificial intelligence. Compared with traditional CGM metrics, they can give a more detailed understanding of glucose fluctuations and trends an
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
How the Diabetes Research Hub Will Modernize and Enhance Diabetes Data Utilization
This article describes the Diabetes Research Hub (DRH), a centralized data management system and repository for gathering, storing, analyzing, and using diabetes data for research. It matters because advanced analytics on large datasets can support a nuanced understanding of physiological patterns a
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
iCoDE June 22, 2022 Steering Committee Meeting Summary Report
A meeting report from the iCoDE project, which is writing the standard for getting continuous glucose monitor data into the electronic health record. The June 22, 2022 steering committee reviewed progress from six working groups. Working Group 1 set out a conceptual framework with a definition of CG
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
The Launch of the iCoDE Standard Project
This article reports the first meeting of the iCoDE project on integrating continuous glucose monitor data into the electronic health record. Diabetes Technology Society organized it virtually on January 27, 2022, with clinicians, government officials, data aggregators, attorneys, and standards expe
Research notes
All of them →Short notes from the running programs on what was done or decided. A note is not a finding until an issue carries it.
- 22 October 2026
A companion repository takes seven steps to set up
Setting up a companion code repository takes seven steps, and most research groups can do the first five in an afternoon once the analysis is finished. The steps go from storing the data in the right place to making the code rerun on new data, and the last one, automated checking, is optional.
- 22 October 2026
A private repository lets a reviewer rerun code that can't be public
Code that can't be public, because of a patent plan, a contract or commercial value, can still be checked. Keep the companion repository private and invite the editor, the reviewers or the funder you choose. Software companies protect their code this way every day.
- 22 October 2026
A result anyone can rerun counts for more than a famous name
When evidence is thin or can't be checked, medicine leans on who said it: the senior author, the famous journal, the expert panel. When anyone can rerun the analysis and test it on new data, the question shifts from who said it to what the evidence keeps showing.
- 22 October 2026
Check reproducibility with rules first, a model second and a person last
Most peer reviewers can't spend days rebuilding an analysis. Automation can take that load, but only if it's built in the right order: rules that a program checks without judgment first, a model only for what rules can't answer, and a person last. A higher layer never overrules a lower one.
- 22 October 2026
Patient data stays governed and the code goes beside the paper
Split a study's materials by risk: data about individual patients goes to a repository built to control access to it, and everything else, the code, the metadata and any data with no patients in it, goes in the companion repository beside the paper. The split puts the governance burden only where the risk is.
- 22 October 2026
A spreadsheet analysis can be a companion repository
Many published analyses were done in a spreadsheet, not in code. That's fine: a spreadsheet with its formulas intact, its data in open formats and a short README that says the order of the steps is a companion repository too.
- 22 October 2026
Versioned releases keep the evidence current while the paper stays fixed
A published paper is a snapshot. A companion repository can keep going: each time the same method runs on new real-world data, the authors publish a new release with its own DOI, and the release the paper cites never changes. Peer review keeps its job, and readers can see whether a finding still holds.
Let machines watch; keep consequential decisions with people
Machines can watch systems and prepare evidence. People remain responsible for decisions that cannot be reversed. This note recommends that machines take the high-volume, repetitive work where errors can be corrected, and that the line between machine and person move only when measured performance supports it.
Collection
Applying our works
All of them →Every use case and case study the Journal carries, newest first: what the firm's works could be used for, and what happened when they were (0014-press FR-057).
Use case
A clinician can see exactly how a study defined its outcome
A clinician deciding whether a study applies to their patients needs the exact definitions behind its conclusion: what counted as treatment response, which patients were left out, which thresholds were used. A companion repository shows them in the code that ran, with the data dictionary, and later releases show whether the finding held on new patients.
Use case
A diligence team can rerun a finding before licensing it
Before a company licenses a biomarker, invests in a device or builds on a published result, its diligence team can rerun the analysis behind the finding. A companion repository, public or shared privately under an agreement, turns a judgment about the authors into a check of the method.
Use case
A funder can ask for a rerun before renewing a grant
A funder or program officer deciding whether to renew a grant usually reads the progress report and the papers. With companion repositories, the funder can also see the actual analysis pipelines, compare methods across the grants in a portfolio, and ask for a rerun of the result the renewal depends on.
Use case
A journal can give reviewers a rerun report with each submission
A journal editor can ask authors to submit a companion repository with the paper, run automated checks and a rerun before review, and hand reviewers a short report: what ran, what matched the paper's numbers, and what was flagged. Reviewers spend their time on the science, and the journal can mark papers whose results rerun.
Use case
A research group can answer reviewers by pointing to code that runs
A research team can publish a companion repository with its paper. When a reviewer asks how a number was produced, the answer is a release that reruns it. The team gets a citable software record, a precise history of every analysis decision, and a way to update the method as new data arrives.
Use case
A course that sends help the moment a learner gets stuck
An online course platform could watch how each learner is doing and send a short explanation, an example or a practice item at the point where that learner struggles, instead of sending everyone through the same lessons.
Founder's research, musing and essays
The archive →Posts and articles the founder published on other sites.
Contrarian Brief
Stop Wasting Your Colleagues’ Time With Your Bad Writing↗
Bad internal writing is not a writing problem. It is a respect problem. Every vague document you send asks your colleagues to finish your thinking for you. AI made the slop cheap to produce and did nothing for the cost of reading it.
Design Pattern
If It Isn't Written Down, It Didn't Happen↗
Regulated industries run on one rule: no document, no event. That sounds bureaucratic until you try to reconstruct a decision from six Slack threads and five different memories. Here's the pattern, and why AI just made it cheap.
Contrarian Brief
Stop Telling People to Communicate Better. Instrument It.↗
Most companies don't have a communication problem. They have an uninstrumented one. Here's how I'd use AI to score communication behavior, turn complaints into structured findings, and leave the human judgments to humans.
Working Theory
Why LLMs Seem to Get Wobblier Near Completion↗
My working theory: these models are great at continuing and lousy at being done. The last stretch of a project probably needs different rules, not a smarter model — a canonical spec, scheduled audits, and a second model as judge.
Contrarian Brief
Some Companies Are Already on Life Support. AI Just Hasn’t Pulled the Plug Yet.↗
Revenue is not the same thing as being alive. A test for founders of mature software companies: if you started this company today, knowing what AI makes possible, would you build anything resembling what you now operate?
Design Pattern
Non-Technical People Belong on Technical Calls. They Just Shouldn’t Ruin Them.↗
The reflex when a business stakeholder derails a technical working session is to stop inviting them. That is almost always the wrong fix. What technical meetings need is rules of engagement, not walls around engineering.
Contrarian Brief
Why Doesn’t Engineering Already Know This?↗
A guide for executives who think every technical problem should already be obvious to the engineering team. Simple after discovery is not the same thing as obvious before discovery, and confusing the two produces terrible management decisions.
Contrarian Brief
Native Alpha: Start With the Advantage You Already Have, Not the Opportunity You Just Noticed↗
Alpha, in investing, is the return you cannot explain by the market. Native Alpha is the business version: the unusual advantage already sitting inside your company, your customers, your data, and your relationships, and the discipline of letting it decide what you build, buy, fund, sell, and stop.
Design Pattern
Test First, Discover Second, Build Third: A Practical Strategy for Brownfield and Legacy Software Engineering↗
For non-trivial changes to legacy systems, define the business outcome first, then how you will prove the change works, before you estimate or build it. Outcome, evaluation, bounded discovery, incremental implementation, in that order.
Contrarian Brief
Alpha, Benchmarks, and Why I Borrowed the Word From Investors↗
Alpha in finance is the return you cannot explain by the market. Here is what that actually means, why investors bother separating skill from luck, and which parts of the idea carry over to running a company and which do not.
Contrarian Brief
Capability Is Cheap Now. Advantage Is Not.↗
AI made building things dramatically cheaper, which quietly destroyed a lot of differentiation that was never real. How to tell commodity execution from differentiated execution, and where to spend the judgment you have left.
Contrarian Brief
Someone Outside the Room Has to Care↗
Enthusiasm inside a company proves nothing. The strength of evidence for an advantage is measured by what somebody outside gave up to act on it, from a compliment at the bottom to a renewal at the top.
Contrarian Brief
Product-Market Fit Does Not Tell You Who to Sell To↗
The same product can be ordinary for one buyer and transformative for another. Product-asymmetry fit and the Ideal Alpha Profile explain why the customer with the biggest problem is often the wrong customer.
Contrarian Brief
Where Native Alpha Actually Lives, and How It Decays↗
Advantage is contextual, it hides at surprisingly small scales, it needs protection in the place it actually lives, and it expires. How to find it, where to put the fence, and when to admit it is gone.
Contrarian Brief
First Principles Got Turned Into a Slogan↗
Reasoning from first principles means stripping a problem down to what you can verify and rebuilding from there. In executive hands it usually means ignoring people with experience. This is the real version, and how it fits with Native Alpha.
Working Theory
Customer-Led Engineering: Software Development in the Age of AI↗
How modern engineering teams should evolve their processes, priorities, and incentives to remain relevant in the era of AI, agents and intelligent systems.
Contrarian Brief
Why Email and Office Documents Are the Perfect UX for Starting Your AI Journey↗
It may sound legacy, but email and document-based workflows are the most effective user interface for launching real-world AI solutions. Here's why AI should start where customers already are.
Design Pattern
How Senior Officials Should Think About AI Roadmaps↗
AI roadmaps are not just technical plans; they are trust strategies, implementation guides, and accountability tools. An AI roadmap for a government or a mission-driven organization has a few essential components, and a test tells whether it is ready to execute.
Working Theory
Why Machine Attestation is Key in the Age of CMMC↗
Under the DoD’s CMMC Program, maintaining continuous compliance is crucial, and machine attestation provides the consistency and accuracy human checks can’t match. By automating compliance tracking, contractors can ensure real-time verification, creating a robust audit trail and reducing compliance risks across contract lifecycles.
Practitioner Journalist
Healthcare’s Cybersecurity Crisis: Leadership Challenges and Strategic Solutions↗
Healthcare's cybersecurity crisis is critical, with outdated defenses exposing patient data and trust. Zero Trust is now mandatory, and delays in breach detection can cause immense damage. Effective leadership, including fractional CISOs, is essential for modern defense. Inaction isn't an option, proactive steps are necessary to safeguard against sophisticated threats.
Practitioner Journalist
CTOs: The Overlooked Asset in a VC's Portfolio↗
Venture capitalists often overlook the strategic importance of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), mistaking technical co-founders as a simple checkbox. A seasoned CTO bridges vision and execution, aligning tech strategy with business goals, mitigating risks, and driving innovation, key factors that can make or break a startup's success.
Practitioner Journalist
Transforming Healthcare with Advanced Applications of High-Performance Computing↗
High-performance computing (HPC) has revolutionized healthcare, particularly in fields like oncology and biomedical engineering, where it enables researchers to perform complex simulations and genetic analyses far quicker than traditional methods. The transition from conventional numerical analysis to dynamic generative AI has further expanded the capabilities of this powerful technology, not only enhancing patient care but also reshaping expectations for rapid medical innovation.
Design Pattern
From Vulnerability to Strength: The Role of CISO Services in Cyber Resilience↗
There was a time when no one really needed a CISO. Today, an organization would be dangerously insane not to have one. And that CISO had better be top-notch. The role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has evolved significantly from being solely a technology-focused professional to becoming a strategic business leader
Working Theory
Embrace Compliance as Code↗
Exploring the benefits of transitioning to a 'compliance as code' model by reflecting on successful implementations of other 'as code' models.
Design Pattern
Role of a Part-Time Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in Regulated Industries↗
Explore how a Fractional CTO can navigate the complex technological landscape in heavily regulated industries, making compliant and informed decisions.
Contrarian Brief
Systems that require human attestation to prove compliance are not secure↗
While a system may meet all the necessary regulations and standards, it can still be vulnerable to threats and attacks because of human attestation.
Contrarian Brief
Staff Retention Might Be More Important Than Recruiting↗
Staff retention refers to the ability of a company to retain its employees over a period of time. It is a crucial aspect of any organization, especially in the technology sector where skilled professionals are in high demand.…
Design Pattern
Enterprise Architecture: A Guide for Tech Leaders↗
Enterprise architecture is a strategic framework that helps organizations align their business and technology strategies. It provides a holistic view of the organization’s structure, processes, and systems, enabling effective…
Design Pattern
The Benefits of Hiring a Fractional Chief Technology Officer↗
A Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is a senior-level executive who provides part-time, strategic guidance and leadership in the technology domain. Unlike a full-time CTO, a fractional CTO works on a contract basis,…
Design Pattern
The Importance of Chief Information Security Officers in Federal Government Contracts↗
A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is a senior executive responsible for establishing and maintaining the enterprise vision, strategy, and program to ensure information assets and technologies are adequately…
Working Theory
How a Fractional Chief Technology Officer Can Drive Innovation↗
A Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is a highly skilled and experienced technology executive who works with companies on a part-time or project basis. They provide strategic guidance and leadership in the development…
Contrarian Brief
Compliant Insecurity in Government Agencies and Contractors↗
I challenge the conventional wisdom on cybersecurity, focusing on the problem of 'compliant insecurity'.
What we think, and what would change our mind
A position states what would make it wrong, and stands until it is settled or reversed, in public.
| Position | Stated | What would make it wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Eidolons: A Working Digital Reflection | Not yet stated | |
| Intellectual Product-Led Growth | Not yet stated | |
| Narrow Made Sense When Connecting Things Was Expensive | 23 October 2026 | Over the next five years, products and research teams that optimize one part of a problem keep beating, in the same markets, the ones that own and close a whole loop, even after both have the same AI. |
No corrections yet
The corrections page →A correction is made in place online and runs in the next printed issue. A reversal of a position is listed, never deleted.
How the Journal is made
What the Journal is
One standing periodical. It reports outcomes of the firm's own work: what was found, made or proved, and the decisions that changed. Company news is never its subject. Sections follow the reader's problem, never a business unit. Writing that lives elsewhere is referenced, never copied.
How settled a claim is
Every card and every article carries its claim kind: an observable fact, an opinion, a framework or an illustration. A working paper has not been peer reviewed and says so. A position states what would make it wrong.
How it is made
Each article names its authors and the research record it draws on, and never poses as that record's primary source. A product enters the Journal with the article that justifies it; its releases are reported as what was made and measured.
Machine edition
Each article has a Markdown copy beside its page and a line in llms.txt; the quarter's items are one JSON document. /journal.json