Episodes

  • A thousand small bargains

    A thousand small bargains
    Jun 27 2026
    David sent an important email last week that a machine wrote, read it, changed nothing, and sent it — one of three handovers that look, on their face, like exactly the surrenders the worriers warn about. None of them were. Taking Rahim Hirji's new book SuperSkills as a generous foil, he argues most AI handovers are good bargains, not a thousand small surrenders dressed as convenience: the machine takes the middle while the parts that decide the outcome climb a level to you — what to ask, whether it's good enough, whether you'll own it. The floor isn't to check every word but to own it to your own standard, and to save your deepest effort for the few tasks where being great beats being good. Never be careless, always be good, sometimes be great. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said.
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    14 mins
  • Average by default

    Average by default
    Jun 20 2026
    Almost nobody who sets up their AI ever tells it who they are. Not just the job title, but how they think, what they notice, how they decide. David Boyle argues that the empty personalisation box is the most useful question the whole product asks, because if you don't tell the model what makes your judgement specific, it has one assumption left: you're average. He builds the case on fresh research showing leading models land on the same argument while people diverge, and on his own work writing down an identity layer a CV can't hold. The edge is the judgement and taste you bring, and it travels with you between systems. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said about spending, budgets and trust.
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    12 mins
  • Ride the bike

    Ride the bike
    Jun 13 2026
    Anthropic's newest model costs exactly double its predecessor, one GitHub Copilot bill jumped from a flat $50 a month towards $3,000, and suddenly the invoice, not the model, is the story. David argues most organisations manage these bills exactly backwards: they celebrate the biggest token burners or cap everyone, and both approaches manage the number instead of the judgement. His maths says the gap between the cheapest sensible model and the dearest buys about 40 seconds of a manager's day. What he would do instead: a floor of five prompts a day for everyone, then a delegation budget run on trust, because a price with a budget behind it sharpens judgement while a price with a cap replaces it. Eddy Merckx supplies the moral: ride the bike. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said about graduate hiring.
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    13 mins
  • The open door

    The open door
    Jun 6 2026
    David finally does the thing he has spent years telling other people to do: he hires a graduate. Ethan joins for a placement year, taken on as an experiment, because the awkward truth is that a graduate today is more capable than ever and less needed than ever. David sets out four hypotheses for why a young person is still worth it: someone has to check and own what the machine makes, managing a machine is real work, it builds judgement fast, and an open door lets useful things in. He borrows Richard Hamming's open-door idea and makes the moral case for keeping the door open, while the front door into work has rarely been harder to push. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said.
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    12 mins
  • How We Got Here

    How We Got Here
    May 30 2026
    David walks through how AI got practically useful, grounded in Dwarkesh Patel and Gavin Leech's The Scaling Era. The through-line: the future of AI has shown up long before it shipped, every single time. Seeing wasn't the hard part; believing it enough to bet on it was. He revisits the early scaling-law moments that should have been obvious to outsiders, asks why they weren't, and what today's people who use language models in their work should be willing to bet on now. Pair with next week's Edition 16, written with Rob Wild at L.E.K., on where things go from here. Plus three things worth knowing, three things to try, and what readers said.
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    14 mins
  • Kids these days

    Kids these days
    May 23 2026
    What happened this week: * AI displacement now shows up in the US government data at both ends of the career ladder: A Bloomberg analysis of new BLS figures finds every one of the eighteen occupations the BLS classifies as A... * The UK's data regulator has put AI hiring tools on formal notice. Sixteen organisations have already had a letter: The Information Commissioner's Office issued formal guidance this week saying that... * Salesforce will spend close to $300 million with Anthropic this year. Marc Benioff says the engineering productivity gains made it the easiest line in the budget: Marc Benioff disclosed that Salesf... What to try: * When the output goes wrong, shrink the task: Justin Skycak put it as a principle for skill acquisition this week: shrink the unit of practice until the mistake has nowhere to hide. The same rule ap... * Ask AI questions it can't possibly know the answer to: A marketing lead at a global firm told David this week she's running a five-minute stress-test on every AI tool she's thinking of trusting. Sh... * Run your day past AI before you start it: A senior leader described her commute habit to David this week. She opens Claude, asks it to review her calendar and her email, then asks it to surface wha... Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-05-23
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    12 mins
  • What boards accept

    What boards accept
    May 16 2026
    What happened this week: * The METR capability curve just went from one hour to one day. The unit of AI autonomy is now measured in human work-days, and the doubling holds on a log scale: METR, an AI evaluation lab, measures... * Half of organisations have already redesigned core workflows around AI, and a fifth have built new business models. The gap framing misses the story: BCG's AI at Work 2025 survey of 10,635 employee... * Anthropic just passed OpenAI in US business AI spend. The strategy lesson is older than AI: pick an audience and serve them: Ramp's AI Index, built from anonymised spend data across its US business... What to try: * Hand over the context, not just the question: Experienced leaders have context and are short on time. AI tools convert context into time saved, but only if you hand the context over. A leader David... * Build a personal skill, and add a rule to it every Sunday: A person David worked with this week reviews 100-page reports from their team on Sunday nights — typos, inconsistent language, logic gaps.... * Schedule a daily AI briefing. The use cases will follow: AI tools sit closed until you open them. That's a real reason senior leaders bounce off: not bad prompts, but a tool that requires you to th... Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-05-16
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    12 mins
  • Choosing is the work

    Choosing is the work
    May 9 2026
    What happened this week: * AI-adopting firms are growing headcount, not cutting it: A Goldman Sachs analysis circulating this week, charted by Callum Williams of The Economist, shows US firms that have adopted AI report net ... * Five percent, not fifty: the candid private-equity number: Pete Stavros, co-head of global private equity at KKR, told the Milken Institute conference last week that AI is improving portfolio compa... * Both AI labs went into private equity the same day: On Monday, Anthropic announced a $1.5 billion vehicle with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and Hellman & Friedman. Engineers from Anthropic will embed ... What to try: * Push it harder, then skillify, then iterate: The simplest workflow upgrade David has coached this year, and it stacks. Push it harder: when the model gives you a perfectly reasonable answer, tell i... * Shadow your most AI-pilled employee for two days: Matt Stockton, an operator and investor, made the case this week. Find the rabbit-holed colleague (not the keenest, not the head of digital transfo... * Ask AI to build you an HTML slide deck instead of PowerPoint: Just ask. "Build me a slide deck on [topic] in a single HTML file." Most chat tools can do this now. Why bother? PowerPoint output from... Read the full edition with all links and sources: https://steadman.ai/newsletters/david/#edition-2026-05-09
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    14 mins