Every note, in one place.

Some of these are standalone observations. A growing set of them belong to one thread — the AI Throughput research — and link to each other in sequence.

A field notes journal page: The Question That Changed My AI Journey, Research Drop #001

These started as pages like this one — before they became posts.

May 2026·Systems Thinking

The Operational Bottleneck AI Still Can't Solve

After months of building, testing, and breaking systems, I've learned this: it's rarely the model. It's the handoff. The gap between automation and accountability.

Read Full Note →
May 2026·Multi-Agent

What Happened When I Let Two AI Agents Compete

Day 2 observations from the Battle of the Bots experiment — unexpected behaviors, emergent strategies, and what they reveal about autonomous decision systems.

Read Full Note →
Apr 2026·Workflow Design

Why Most AI Demos Fail in Real Business Environments

The gap between sandbox performance and operational deployment is wider than most people admit. Here's what actually breaks.

Read Full Note →
May 2026·AI Principles

Building Trust in AI Systems One Decision at a Time

Accountability isn't a feature you bolt on later. It has to be designed from the start — visible, intentional, and human-centered.

Read Full Note →
Jun 2026·Throughput Thinking

Why Every Improvement Creates Another Bottleneck

This is the note that started the rest of them. I kept closing out automation projects that worked exactly as designed, and the organization didn't get faster in any way I could point to.

Read Full Note →
Jun 2026·Socratic AI

AI Is My Jonah

I said it as a joke in a chat window before I meant it. Somewhere in a few hundred back-and-forth exchanges, I noticed AI doing the same thing to me that Jonah did to Alex Rogo.

Read Full Note →
Jun 2026·Operational Accounting

Digital Work-in-Process

If AI can generate ten times the output, where does the tenth-times pile up? Manufacturing has a name for unsold inventory. Knowledge work doesn't, yet.

Read Full Note →
May 2026·Metrics

The Dashboard That Lied

I built a dashboard that hit every number it was supposed to hit, and it took months to notice nobody's decisions actually changed because of it.

Read Full Note →
May 2026·Throughput Thinking

Throughput Is Not Speed

If everyone works faster, does more value actually reach the customer? Not automatically — and that gap is the whole reason this research exists.

Read Full Note →
May 2026·Metrics

Robot Adoption and AI Adoption

The robots in a 1984 novel made one resource look brilliant on a report and left the rest of the plant exactly as constrained as before. Read that as a period piece at your own risk.

Read Full Note →
Jun 2026·Metrics

What Should AI Productivity Actually Measure?

Most AI adoption metrics measure activity: logins, prompts, hours theoretically saved. None of them ask whether more finished value reached a customer or a decision.

Read Full Note →
Jun 2026·Operational Accounting

Decision Inventory

How much of an organization's 'work' is actually just decisions waiting for someone to make them? Once I started looking for it, I found queues everywhere nobody called a queue.

Read Full Note →
Jun 2026·Workflow Design

When Custom AI Beats Packaged Software

When is it actually worth building something instead of buying it? I default toward buying for most things and building for the handful of workflows where the fit really matters.

Read Full Note →
Jun 2026·AI Principles

Curiosity as an Operating System

What actually explains the difference between people who get real value from AI and people who don't? It isn't technical skill.

Read Full Note →
Jul 2026·Design & Communication

People Don't Read Data. They Read What Their Brain Can Process.

The data was accurate, available, and regularly shared. It still wasn't changing behavior. The question wasn't whether the data was correct — it was why it wasn't landing.

Read Full Note →
Jul 2026·AI Adoption

The AI Great Divide Isn't About AI

My husband sent me an article about a growing divide between two types of AI users. I laughed and said we were in the builder category. Then I decided I didn't agree there were only two.

Read Full Note →
Jul 2026·AI Principles

She Didn't Need the Answer

I expected my daughter to use AI to get answers. Instead, I watched her learn how to ask better ones. This isn't a rebuttal to the worry that AI makes people stop thinking — just a reason to hold it a little less absolutely.

Read Full Note →
Jul 2026·Systems Thinking

The Hidden Cost of Extra Hands

Every handoff had a good reason for existing once. I wanted to ask a different question: was this review actually adding value, or was it just delaying the work?

Read Full Note →