Failure Briefs
Postmortem-style analysis of AI system failures, fragility, and production risk.
Guides and explainers
Detailed guides and practical technical analysis.
Latest analysis
Recent research, benchmark reviews and technical updates.
Practical tools
Templates for budgets and project planning
BoredTools offers practical spreadsheets for budgets, freelance work and small projects.
Your Agent's System Prompt Is Fighting Itself
A framework called Arbiter treats agent system prompts as auditable code. Applied to Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI, it found 152 interference patterns — including critical contradictions and a structural data loss bug — for a total cost of $0.27.
Alignment Works in English. In Japanese, It Backfires.
A new study shows the same alignment intervention that produces strong safety effects in English reverses direction in Japanese, increasing harmful outputs. Tested across 1,584 simulations, 16 languages, and three model families.
Most AI Agents Don't Know When They're Wrong
A 4B parameter model just matched GPT-4o on tool-use tasks by learning to verify its own actions. The CoVe paper shows verification-first training beats the retry-and-pray approach plaguing production
One Fake Source Broke Every Agent
A single misinformation article injected into search rankings crashed GPT-5's accuracy from 65.1% to 18.2%. The agents had unlimited access to truthful sources and couldn't be bothered to look.
AI Agent Security Checklist
AI agents don't just have a security problem. They have a fundamentally different security problem than the systems they're replacing. Five attack surfaces and the defense patterns that actually work.
Chain-of-Thought Prompting: When It Works, When It Fails, and Why
Chain-of-thought is the most studied prompting technique in AI, and the most misapplied. A decision framework for when it helps, when it hurts, and what it costs.
Your Multi-Agent System Is Colliding
Most production agent systems don't fail because individual agents are stupid. They fail because three agents tried to solve the same problem...
Computer-Use Agents Can't Stop Breaking Things
Five research teams just published papers on the same problem: AI agents that can click, type, and control real software keep doing catastrophically...
Synthetic Data Won't Save You From Model Collapse
The AI industry's running out of internet. Every major lab's already scraped the same corpus, and the easy gains from scaling data are tapering. The...
AI Agents Are Security's Newest Nightmare
I've spent the last month reading prompt injection papers, and the thing that keeps me up isn't the attack success rates. It's how many production systems...