Over the past few months my AI second brain crossed a threshold from tool I invoke to collaborator I dispatch — driven by multi-agent workflows, cross-session memory, and deep domain expertise.
Research shows that "AI brain fry" — cognitive exhaustion from overseeing AI agents — is real, and that productivity actually dips after using more than three AI tools simultaneously.
Shipping worse code with AI agents is a choice. Simon Willison and Mitchell Hashimoto both argue we should engineer our processes so agents make our code better, not worse.
*Derek Thompson writes about three reasons to be a parent—the most compelling being that parenthood means constantly meeting new versions of your child, "a permanent relationship with strangers, plural to the extreme."*
Carson Gross's essay on AI and junior programmers applies just as much to product managers: you can't build an effective AI-powered workflow until you've spent years developing the underlying judgment it's meant to amplify.
Matt Shumer makes the case that AI is fundamentally different from previous waves of automation because it's a general substitute for cognitive work, and the escape routes that existed before are closing fast.
How a simple folder structure with a living CONTEXT.md file eliminates context fragmentation and makes AI assistants dramatically more useful on complex projects.