AI is alchemy, inverted. It works and we don’t know why. The true practitioners learn to endow themselves with its powers. The dishonest ones pretend they’ve bottled it.
Alchemy is the category of things that work for reasons the spreadsheet can’t capture — folk wisdom, intuition, the counterintuitive move. AI belongs in that category, but it got there from the other direction. It’s not folk wisdom outrunning science. It’s engineering outrunning its own explanation.
The people who built it can’t fully say what it does. The people using it keep stumbling into capabilities nobody designed. The useful response is to take the strangeness seriously and learn to work with it anyway. The other response — most of the industry — is to pretend the strangeness has been resolved, packaged into a framework, and sold by the unit.
The clients who get hurt aren’t the skeptics. They’re the ones who were promised transformation and got a tool nobody told them how to use. Seventeen years of watching SEO cycles is enough to know that the consultants who win in the short run by joining the hype almost always lose the relationship. Refusing to shortcut that conversation is the whole job.
A weekly dispatch.
Essays, shorts, and field notes on AI in its utility and weirdness. One real situation at a time, looked at carefully.
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