Who gets to augment you?

In an earlier piece, I described a working group looking at the same process map - an engineer, a controller, a manager - each of them leaving the meeting having learned something different from it. The document belonged to the company. What each of them took away from it never really belonged to anyone, not because anyone decided that, but because there was no way to get at it and claim it even if someone had wanted to. It’s the comfortable fiction employment has always relied on: you keep your experience, we keep the work product. Read more here.

The agent that has nothing to do

I’ve spent the last few months “playing” with agent - yes, I fell for the OpenClaw hype too. Reading documentation, running experiments, trying to wire things together. The question I was asking was: which of these gets me closer to the daemon?

I eventually realized I was asking the wrong question. But getting there required enough failed experiments to understand why.

The appeal of agents

The agent pitch is compelling on paper. You give a system tools - the ability to search, read, write, call APIs, interact with other services - and it uses them autonomously to complete complex tasks. Add enough intelligence, connect enough services, and you theoretically get something that can act on your behalf across your digital life.

The wrong reason to go local

When you ask the right question, the answer isn’t what you expected.

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I am running both. A local model on my own hardware - small, private, entirely under my control - alongside using Claude (the app or the API) that have become part of how I actually think through problems. And at some point I stopped and asked myself: what am I actually trying to achieve with each of these?