John Fowler

Will Smith eating pasta is now the official benchmark for AI progress. This is actually insane.

"Attorneys should ask themselves whether the time and effort they will save by using generative AI to draft a legal document is worth the damage their career and professional reputation will suffer if they do not ensure the document’s accuracy."

Eli Goldratt's book, The Goal, was famous for its (then unpopular argument) that keeping every machine running 24 hours a day, the metric most plant managers cared about, was actively making factories worse. I suspect we're seeing the same fallacy in how many people are using AI agents. Goldratt's point was that machine utilization isn't throughput. What you want from a manufacturing plants is making good widgets as cost-effectively as possible. It doesn't necessarily follow that running your machines all the times optimizes that. Picture a three-station assembly line. Stations 1 and 2 each crank out 200 widgets an hour. Station 3 can only handle 100. Running stations 1 and 2 around the clock doesn't ship more product. It just piles up half-finished widgets in front of station 3, ties up cash in inventory, and creates more work managing the pile. He developed the Theory of Constraints to point out that what matters is solving the bottleneck in the system, not increasing machine utilization. I suspect a lot of agent usage right now is the same fallacy at higher resolution. Running 20 Claude Code sessions in parallel can feel productive because something is always happening. But, if the bottleneck in your work is judgment about what's worth doing, more agents just generate more output for you to wade through. This is not to say there aren't workflows running 20 agents in parallel very effectively, I'm sure there are. And, I suspect there's a general retraining we all need to do around evolving historical workflows. But.... The constraint for most knowledge work is deciding what's worth executing and no one is task switching between 20 things at the same time effectively I don't think. I find I can run maybe 2 or 3 things in parallel with maybe 1 or 2 admin-y type things on the side and that is only if I'm very locked in.

Here's a case that shows how one word can make a huge difference in a contract. Dimebag Darrell's trust sued Dean Guitars for using Dime's likeness and endorsement after the licensing agreement ended. Long story short, Dean Guitars won because the agreement required ceasing production of the endorsed guitars upon "termination," not "termination or expiration." The agreement expired; it was never terminated. That single drafting choice cost the Trust its core contract breach theory. This is a pet issue of mine, but: if you "save $800/hr on legal drafting fees" by having Claude write your contracts, are you going to catch that "or expiration" is missing? Maybe you would, maybe not. Maybe it will never matter. But it when it does, that $800/hr will have been worth it.

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Platforms $META just sent a memo to employees saying Meta Platforms is installing a new tracking software on the computers of all employees in the United States 🇺🇸 so it can train its AI Meta said the tracking tool will run on a list of work-related apps and websites The tool will capture stuff like mouse movements, keystrokes and screenshots of what the employees are seeing on their screens - Reuters