Writing Team
In the 1980s, an expert system called XCON got so good at configuring computers that DEC couldn't run without it. Half its rules had to be rewritten every year. The world kept changing, and the system was load-bearing. We found that curve everywhere in this issue. Knowledge becomes callable, which makes it easier to use and harder to question. The model behind an agent swaps out and nobody tells the user. Practitioners who insist on containment are responding to a stage they don't control. The hard problem with agents is what success costs.
Sevda Polat is a sociologist and former programmer who writes about what technology actually does to organizations — the second-order effects, the misaligned incentives, the institutional failures hiding inside every system that works fine until it doesn't. She traces the gap between what systems promise and what they produce.
Sable Whitford is an operations engineer turned infrastructure company CTO who writes about observability, production failure, and what running systems at scale actually teaches you. Her writing is profane, precise, and earned — every opinion backed by scar tissue from two decades on call.
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