Essays

Laddering up from chatboxes to autonomy

Will Schenk April 14, 2026

Laddering up from chatboxes to autonomy

Most companies want to go from scattered ChatGPT use directly to agents and autonomy. The middle layers — the ones where deployments either become real or die — get skipped in the planning.

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Building an Intelligent Organization

Will Schenk April 11, 2026

Building an Intelligent Organization

From AI pilots to production systems — how we help leadership move up the maturity curve with principal-led engagements.

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Gemma 4 on Your Machine: How Google’s New Open Weights Stack Up (Model Showdown)

Will Schenk April 4, 2026

Gemma 4 on Your Machine: How Google’s New Open Weights Stack Up (Model Showdown)

We benchmarked Gemma 4 (e2b, default, 26B MoE, 31B dense) through Ollama against 50+ hosted and local models on reasoning, knowledge, instruction, coding, and TezLab MCP tool use—same Umwelten harness as our other showdowns. Here’s where the new line shines, where frontier models still pull ahead, and how the biggest Gemma handles real EV data tools.

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Same Weights, Different Results

Will Schenk March 24, 2026

Same Weights, Different Results

We ran the same Nemotron model on four providers and got wildly different results. MCP tool use ranged from 1/6 to 6/6. Speed varied 16x. The weights are identical. The results are not.

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Can LLMs Use Real-World Tools? Mercury-2, ELO, and the Umwelten Setup

Will Schenk March 15, 2026

Can LLMs Use Real-World Tools? Mercury-2, ELO, and the Umwelten Setup

We ran 39 models against real Rivian driving data via MCP tools. Inception's Mercury-2 delivered a perfect 15/15 in 8.6 seconds. Here's the standout model, the ELO narrative rankings, and how the same Umwelten setup powers both chat and evals.

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Sraffa's Gesture, the Crack in the Crystal, and Why the Stochastic Parrot Still Bites

Will Schenk March 12, 2026

Sraffa's Gesture, the Crack in the Crystal, and Why the Stochastic Parrot Still Bites

Wittgenstein's shift from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations—triggered by Sraffa's Neapolitan gesture—reframes the stochastic parrot debate. The danger isn't that LLMs lack secret understanding. It's our willingness to treat fluent simulation as the real thing.

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The Car Wash Test: Learning from Model Evals

Will Schenk March 1, 2026

The Car Wash Test: Learning from Model Evals

We asked 131 AI models a simple question — should I walk or drive to the car wash? 76% got it wrong. Simple gotcha questions reveal more about model reasoning than any benchmark leaderboard.

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The Agent Habitat

Will Schenk February 5, 2026

The Agent Habitat

An agent isn't just automation with LLM calls. It carries state, accumulates memory, and makes bounded decisions under uncertainty — and a git repo is where all of that lives.

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The Data Flywheel Pattern

Will Schenk January 22, 2026

The Data Flywheel Pattern

Build applications by dropping in data and letting AI handle parsing, structuring, and synthesis. Three case studies.

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Claude Code, not Code

Will Schenk January 14, 2026

Claude Code, not Code

The real power of Claude Code isn't writing software—it's orchestrating skills for research, newsletters, browser automation, and turning one-off requests into repeatable workflows.

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How I Use AI in Jan 2026

Will Schenk January 3, 2026

How I Use AI in Jan 2026

We're at the beginning of infinity. In geological time this is all happening in an instant — and 2026 might be the best year to be alive.

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"You're absolutely right" and other AI warning signs

Will Schenk December 16, 2025

When your AI assistant starts agreeing with everything, you've hit the dumb zone. Practical techniques for managing context windows and keeping AI useful.

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AI tools fail loudly where humans failed quietly

Will Schenk December 10, 2025

AI coding tools don't work well in messy codebases. The fix is doing what should have been done all along - and that's good for everyone.

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AI Engineering Summit 2025: Bash-Pilled and Building for Everyone

Will Schenk November 22, 2025

AI Engineering Summit 2025: Bash-Pilled and Building for Everyone

The models got smart. The tools got simple. The circle of who builds is expanding.

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Code Generation with Local Models

Will Schenk August 20, 2025

Code Generation with Local Models

Small, local AI models deliver surprisingly effective results for everyday tasks. Also llama3.2 is surprisingly fast and gpt-oss is surprisingly good.

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Technical Debt and the ROI Threshold

Will Schenk July 3, 2025

Technical Debt and the ROI Threshold

With agents now able to read and refactor code, the future cost of messy code -- and the current costs of unwritten code -- is shrinking. Code is more disposable and experimentation more rewarding.

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Don't be passive aggressive with your agents

Will Schenk June 25, 2025

Don't be passive aggressive with your agents

Treat your coding agents as adaptable collaborators—communicate clearly, value efficiency over endurance, match tools to your workflow, skip unnecessary formality, rethink technical debt, and document your development rules for best results.

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Feature Development on the go

Will Schenk June 8, 2025

Feature Development on the go

What happens when you challenge Google Jules, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor to build a PWA—using just your phone? Find out which agent delivered.

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Geo-affordance

Will Schenk June 2, 2025

Geo-affordance

Imagine having Sherlock Holmes’ legendary eye for detail—AI now makes that possible for all of us. Is this AI changing us? It will alter our expectations and the risks of everyday digital life.

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Thoughts on gemini

Will Schenk April 4, 2025

Thoughts on gemini

Despite popular narratives about Google lagging in AI, their Gemini models reveal engineering excellence that's hard to ignore when you strip away the conservative product decisions and UI polish. From the lightweight yet powerful Gemma 3 to the multimodal capabilities of Gemini 2.5, Google's models demonstrate a level of speed, precision, and fundamental understanding that suggests they're not playing catch-up—they're just being cautious.

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Moral Vibe Check

Will Schenk March 24, 2025

Moral Vibe Check

Technical correctness and meaningful insight: well-formatted, detailed AI responses can mask a fundamental lack of understanding—a "raving lunatic" hidden behind impressive form. Maybe P-doom is less about malice and more of making us intellectually poorer by substituting form for substance, facts for understanding, and technical accuracy for wisdom.

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Agentic YOLO with Warp, Cursor, and Claude

Will Schenk March 7, 2025

Agentic YOLO with Warp, Cursor, and Claude

What happens when you let AI help you think through and build your ideas, with minimal supervision and maximum trust? What does it mean to be a programmer? Are we closer or further from thought-stuff?

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Clipboards are eating the world

Will Schenk February 25, 2025

Clipboards are eating the world

The untold story of how your computer's clipboard sees itself as the essential bridge between humans and AI tools in the creative process. Through its eyes, we witness the journey of how digital projects come together through countless transfers between different AI services.

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The New Touch Interface

Will Schenk February 11, 2025

The New Touch Interface

The real killer apps of smartphones weren't the early games but became things like group chats and video calls that fundamentally changed how we communicate. Similarly, while we're currently amazed by AI's capabilities, we're still discovering how these tools will meaningfully integrate into our lives.

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Tools for thinking. Everyday AI.

Will Schenk January 30, 2025

Tools for thinking. Everyday AI.

From building nuclear fusors to probing Vatican AI doctrine, this exploration reveals how AI tools are reshaping our daily intellectual work in surprisingly practical ways. Through examples of interfacing with databases, analyzing legal documents, and diving into deep research rabbit holes, we see how AI assistants are becoming intuitive research companions that expand our ability to quickly understand and synthesize complex information.

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How I classify models

Will Schenk January 21, 2025

How I classify models

Small models are smart yet limited in knowledge; foundation models possess both deep understanding and extensive knowledge but lack structured problem-solving approaches. Educated models like DeepResearch excel by combining learned reasoning processes with large memory capacities, enabling them to adapt effectively to complex tasks while handling vast information instantaneously.

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AI for research: DeepResearch a clear winner

Will Schenk January 12, 2025

AI for research: DeepResearch a clear winner

Asking the tough questions: DeepResearch excels in depth and comprehensiveness, while o1, Sonnet 3.5, and DeepSeek with DeepThought provide comparable results for complex inquiries. Smaller models like phi4 and llama3.2 are deemed inadequate for intricate topics.

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Learning on the go with NotebookLM

Will Schenk January 9, 2025

Learning on the go with NotebookLM

By utilizing NotebookLM, an AI model capable of generating audio summaries and interactive conversations, you can create customized podcasts on-the-go. You can also join the conversation.

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Making hard things easier

Will Schenk December 15, 2024

Making hard things easier

Explore how generative AI-based tools can revolutionize the way we work, making creative tasks more accessible and efficient for both novices and experts, while also highlighting the importance of critical thinking and creativity in the face of automation.

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