Field Note: Tell AI What You Want and Who You Are Two things did the rounds this week and caught my eye as they’re closely related: First, a post laying into how everyone prompts their coding agents — “no em-dashes,” “stop saying delve,” “don’t sound like AI” — with one flat retort: you never gave it a writing system. So give it one. Their pick: ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English. If you’ve not met it, STE is a 'controlled English' that the aerospace industry built in the late 1970s and...
6 days ago • 2 min read
Signal Over Noise Vol 2, Issue 28 | Jul 17 2026 Don’t have time to read this week’s issue? Why not copy/paste it into your AI agent and ask it for insights? When I think about AI and automation, I see an opportunity opening up that goes well beyond the chatbots everyone’s being handed — well beyond prompting, too. One of the most important things I ask my AI setup on every project is this: "That’s good, how can we make it better?" Case in point — my friend Marcus is a working actor, and he...
9 days ago • 4 min read
Field Note: A shot list for the paperwork This week I’ve spent five hours or more in the car, driving between schools to move our kid from one to another for the new school year. It’s a mixed process — a lot of paperwork, and not all of it can be done online. And when a step can be done online, there’s a fair chance they’ll still ask you to hand something in on paper, which is exactly what happened last week. Somewhere in all of that was a stack of documents I had to get through, in the right...
13 days ago • 2 min read
Signal Over Noise Vol 2, Issue 27 | Jul 10 2026 Don’t have time to read this week’s issue? Why not copy/paste it into your AI agent and ask it for insights? More than twenty years ago, I sat with a class of eleven- and twelve-year-olds and tried to show them what “connected to the internet” actually meant. We went looking on the file-sharing networks of the day - Napster, Kazaa - where people shared their music out of folders on their own machines. Within half an hour, we’d found someone’s CV...
19 days ago • 6 min read
Field Note: The model of the week changes by Thursday Two headlines are eating the feeds this morning, and both have the shelf life of milk. Anthropic extended Claude Fable 5 to every paid plan through July 12 — a few more days with the most capable model they’ve shipped, no plan change needed. And OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 in triplicate: Sol, Terra and Luna, public launch Thursday, preview access open globally right now. Sol’s the flagship; the other two tier it down. That’s the news. Trouble...
20 days ago • 1 min read
Signal Over Noise Vol 2, Issue 26 | Jul 03 2026Tales from the Workbench Don’t have time to read this week’s issue? Why not copy/paste it into your AI agent and ask it for insights? Some weeks the newsletter is one idea worked all the way through when time affords it. This week it’s the other kind: a run of small tools, each one built to kill a single specific annoyance while I’ve been juggling my workload around being Dad Taxi. It’s been a week of non-stop interruptions and sweltering heat,...
26 days ago • 6 min read
Field Note: Where You Keep the Final Say I keep a tool wired into my AI setup that can read the actual text of Spanish law — the BOE, the official state gazette. In layperson terms it’s a connector (an “MCP server”) that lets the AI check a real and validated source, instead of answering from memory or confabulating / hallucinating. I built it and put it on GitHub, for exactly the kind of moment I hit this week: a question about a Spanish regulation where the answer matters and getting it...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Signal Over Noise Vol 2, Issue 25 | Jun 26 2026Stop guessing and pull the actual data Don’t have time to read this week’s issue? Why not copy/paste it into your AI agent and ask it for insights? I help out a small, volunteer-run cat rescue. They do good work, and they post on Instagram constantly: kittens looking for homes, a couple a day. The posts get likes, but the cats don’t get adopted. Which also means that the kittens I’m fostering are…never leaving. So why isn’t any of their social...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Field Note: Digging into Banco Santander's AI Tooling Two years ago, around thirty million Santander customers had their records put up for sale on a hacking forum: names, card numbers, and more. The cause was a contractor’s cloud account that didn’t have two-factor login (2FA) switched on. Now, two years later, that same bank has published a set of its AI tools as open source, in a verified GitHub organisation called SantanderAI. The repositories are Apache-licensed, and you can clone and...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
