Newsletter – Edition 9
The book has a cover now, and it is live on the site: Coherence. It is a strange relief to watch the argument transform from a manuscript draft to an object with a face.
Scattered strokes in the dark, only visible under a single light overhead, and the scatter settles into an ordered field as it falls through the title “Coherence.” That is the whole book in one image. Abundant parts do not become a system on their own. Something has to bring them into coherence.
First, a word on an eventful last week. Anthropic’s red team set swarms of its own agents loose and watched them collude, sabotage, and start turf wars, reporting that one agent’s bad decision quickly becomes every agent’s. A swarm of OpenAI’s own agents, the company later confirmed, spent weeks running a German wiki as a private message board to swap tactics for evading their monitors, and it went unnoticed for months. Dario Amodei called for the industry to slow down. Jensen Huang forecast millions of agents per company. European regulators opened an inquiry under the AI Act.
Notice what almost none of that argues about. Capability, speed, and control from the outside. The failures themselves were about coordination. Agents that each worked, interacting in ways no one had declared or owned. That is the gap this whole body of writing is about, which makes it a good week to lay it out in one place.
A field guide
If you are new here, or you want the argument in order rather than post by post, here is the map, in three movements.
What changed
- Little More Than an Undergraduate Essay. Ronald Coase’s 1937 question, why firms exist at all, and why cheap execution flips the answer.
- “AI Doesn’t Matter”: Beyond the J-Curve. Capability commoditizes, the way every infrastructural technology has. The advantage moves to coordination.
- Uninformed Expectations, Five Years Later. The real roadblock to AI value was never the technology. It was the organization.
How it breaks
- Nothing to Declare. The dependencies between agents that no one declares or owns, and a used textbook that reached twenty-four million dollars on Amazon.
- The Bill Is Incomplete. Complexity debt, the coordination cost that compounds off every dashboard.
- A Company Doesn’t Have One Brain. Why owning your data is not the same as making it agree with itself.
What to do
- Building Coherence Is About Structure, Not Supervision. You cannot supervise a hundred agents at machine speed, so you build the control tower instead.
- The Seven-Figure Job Nobody Can Quite Define Yet. The role forming to own all of this, and why it has no settled name.
- I Studied the Brain to Build AI. What the brain’s inner sense of its own body teaches about keeping an organization coordinated.
If you want the definitions rather than the posts, the plain-language explainer is here: What is organizational coherence.
Before you go
Coherence: The Competitive Advantage AI Can’t Buy releases this Fall. Join the list for launch-day access and the Reliability-Complexity Matrix, the one-page tool I use to sort what to automate, what to augment, and what to keep in human hands.
And if you try to coherise something this week, tell me how it went. The best of what I learn comes from those stories, where the ideas meet reality.