Issue 42 — October 17, 2026

A working journal from inside a technical writing team adopting AI faster than the org chart can keep up. Longform essays, tooling teardowns, and uncomfortable observations.

42Essays
62KWords published
~9mAverage read
5Beats covered
★ Pinned AI 20 min read · October 17, 2026

Every Number Has a Parent

How LLM training actually works, shown in a working miniature transformer-style model with 44 knobs that you can train in your browser. Tokens, embeddings, Q K V attention, logits, loss, backpropagation and Adam, with every number traced...

2

Loop Engineering Is a Writing Job

Your agent ends every session with the same confident word. Here is the loop that checks that word from outside: a written definition of done, a boring checker, a heartbeat, and a grade. Five small files, one afternoon, real output included.

AI 19 min read
Jul 19
2026 →
4

The Trust layer nobody built

You wrapped your documentation pipeline in Claude skills and wrote rules in markdown to keep them honest. Those rules are a sticky note, not a guardrail. Here is how a technical writer builds trust they can actually rely on into their own AI workflow: a check the agent can't override, provenance on every draft, and the seven things you do this week.

AI 15 min read
Jun 27
2026 →
8

There Is More to AI

Five research papers, a holiday week, and what I kept thinking about after I published the last one

AI 14 min read
Mar 5
2026 →