Jason A. Hoffman

Part 12 in the series. The hardest skill in engineering is not technical. It’s emotional. Most people cannot sit with not knowing the full state of things. The desire for control is the root of most bad architecture — in software, in organizations, and in life.

53 Years in the Making. A companion reading list to Agents Are Agents (Part 11). The AI agent discourse treats ‘agent’ as if it were coined last year. It wasn’t. 21 papers from Hewitt’s Actor model (1973) through Erlang, BDI, SmartOS, and MCP to Claude Code. The substrate changed. The architecture didn’t.

Part 11 in the series. The AI agent discourse acts like ‘agent’ is a new concept invented by the LLM era. It wasn’t. Erlang called them agents in 1986. The architecture requirements haven’t changed. If an AI agent is a problem in your system, your system has problems.

Part 10 in the series. Previously: Computational Strategy (Part 9), Model Eats Software (Part 8), On Keeping AI in the Critical Path (Part 7), The Confident Incompetence Problem (Part 6), The Disintermediation Principle (Part 5), Zen of Unix Tools (Part 4). You want to build a home. But then you start building a house, which…

Part 9 in a series. Previously: Model Eats the Software (Part 8), The Confident Incompetence Problem (Part 6), Confidence All the Way Down (Part 6b), On Keeping AI in the Critical Path (Part 7), The Disintermediation Principle (Part 5), Zen of Unix Tools (Part 4). The Transition Strategy has been narrative. Consultants build slide decks.…

February 24, 2026 Two recent pieces frame the AI infrastructure debate from opposite poles. Citadel Securities published “The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis”, arguing that AI displacement risk is overstated and adoption follows predictable S-curves. Citrini Research published “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, modeling a structured bear case where rapid white-collar displacement triggers a deflationary spiral…

A Recursive Proof of the Confident Incompetence Problem Originally published at https://the-ai-dialogues.com/commentary/confidence-all-the-way-down I asked a frontier model to write the Constitution of the United States in formally verifiable code. The same kind of code we use to certify flight software — the kind that proves a helicopter autopilot won’t kill you. The model delivered 1,969…

When AI Architects Systems It Cannot Operate Originally published at https://the-ai-dialogues.com/commentary/the-confident-incompetence-problem I models have mastered a specific form of helpfulness: confidently proposing systems that require an Operations Research PhD to implement, delivered with the enthusiasm of someone who absolutely cannot help you implement it. Ask a frontier model to solve an optimization problem, and watch…

Part 8 in the series. Previously: [Zen of Unix Tools], [The Disintermediation Principle], [Keeping AI in the Critical Path]. In August 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote “Why Software Is Eating the World” in the Wall Street Journal. His thesis was that software companies were poised to take over large swathes of the economy: that the world…

What it means when the marginal cost of cross-referencing approaches zero. Every domain has a corpus too large for any human to hold at once. Law has 275,000 sections of statute and regulation. Medicine has millions of papers and trial results. Codebases have millions of lines across thousands of files. Financial systems have decades of…