What should remain manual?
Speed is not automatically leverage. Some steps exist to force judgment, accountability, or shared understanding.
Working Notes
What I am testing, changing, and still trying to understand.
These notes are for work in motion: useful observations, failed attempts, changed beliefs, and questions that deserve a better test.
Now
Current questions
I am interested in the points where AI stops being a model problem and becomes a workflow, context, or judgment problem.
Where does source truth break?
Many confident outputs fail because the governing material is incomplete, contradictory, or allowed to drift.
What survives handoff?
A workflow is not finished when its creator can run it. It is finished when another person can use it safely.
Recent notes
Lessons with dates attached.
12 Jul 2026
Simpler prompts beat specifications.
While generating imagery for two websites, I kept tightening the prompts: exact object counts, camera settings, lists of things to avoid. Each constraint made the results worse. A four-sentence plain description of the scene worked on the first try.
Changed belief: image models compose better from intent than from specification. Constraints earn their place by correcting a failure that actually happened, not by preventing one I imagined. I suspect the same is true of task instructions for people.
12 Jul 2026
Finished is not the same as reachable.
A content audit of this site found two completed pages with zero inbound links. They built cleanly, passed every automated check, and no visitor could ever find them. The test suite asserted what the pages contained, not whether anything pointed to them.
New checklist item: a page is done when there is a path to it. The general form: an artifact is not shipped because it exists. It is shipped when the intended person can reach it without knowing it exists.
11 Jul 2026
Every fact needs one home.
Splitting my work across two sites created a quiet failure mode: the same evidence numbers living in both places, free to drift apart with every edit. The fix was an editorial rule, not a tool — each fact has one canonical home, and everywhere else links or summarizes.
This is the same rule that governs my document production work: one source of truth, downstream artifacts derive from it. It transferred from military orders to personal websites without modification.
Writing lanes
Two sites, two kinds of notes.
Here
Personal working notes
Cross-domain AI lessons, experiments, tools I tried, mistakes, career reflections, and questions that are not specific to military training.
Discuss a question →NextGen Wargame
Military systems field notes
CADE development, exercise design, controller products, orders production, adjudication, and governed military AI workflows.
Read Field Notes ↗Useful friction