How to control an agent swarm
whistleblowing, civic reminders, and the right ways to anthropomorphise AI
Tech
Strange Loop Canon.
Essays on complex systems, AI agents, and the 'agentic economy'.
Recent essays
30 of 41Who Wins As Intelligence Commodifies?
A fun feature of life in 2026 is that it’s filled with drama.
AIs are companies, my friend
on the need for liberalism for AI
Nobody Knows Anything
on living with ignorance
LLM councils show groupthink
perils and problems of LLM peer review
Who Audits the Auditors?
Can one AI system make another AI system audit it less independently, just by explaining it’s point of view?
Introducing BenchBench
TL;DR: presenting the ultimate benchmark, getting models to create benchmarks for each other, and GPT 5.2 is the current (only) winner
Homo Agenticus
sapiens
Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence
.
Experiments with Vibe Science
wherein I accidentally pursue an amateur paleontology phd
Why Coase needs Hayek
sometimes smart planners lose to simple markets
Agent, Know Thyself! (and bid accordingly)
why we need to train models to learn their own capabilities, and how this will help them bid for work!
Aligned Agents Still Build Misaligned Organisations
agent handoffs launder uncertainty into official truth
Deciphering Papyri
analysing bureaucracy in roman egypt
LLM Enron: experiments on structure vs scale
can AI agents work inside a real organisation?
Can we build a management flight simulator?
turns out, yes
Notes on Hong Kong
.
The future of work is world models
Why we need to build Starcraft for CEOs
Vignettes from the Takeoff
Excerpts from a future history memoir
Aligning Anthropic
The Department of War is angry at an AI lab
Notes on Mexico
.
The Tragedy of the Agentic Commons
Demonstrating why everyone getting their own AI agents will necessitate markets; otherwise known as Hayek's revenge
Will money still exist in the agentic economy?
Yes
Seeing like an agent
AI agents as digital daemons
Contra Scott on AI safety and the race with China
AI safety critics are inconsistent - they oppose safety regs but support chip exports to China
Epicycles All The Way Down
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” — George E.
Poisoned prose
on semantic trojan horses in LLMs
Can we get an AI to write better?
A small step
Anomie
the vibes they are a-changin
Prediction is hard, especially about the future
more reinforcement learning, this time on the future