Nora Kaplan
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CURRENT

A journal for living in the agentic age

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December — Issue #8

When the Web Split in Two
Infrastructure Inflections
When the Web Split in Two

JavaScript frameworks made browsing delightful in 2010, but that same architectural shift created the timing puzzles and complexity that web automation infrastructure still navigates today.

When Agents Ask for Advice Instead of Permission
Tools in Context
When Agents Ask for Advice Instead of Permission

When proven agents shift from seeking permission to requesting strategic guidance, transforming humans from gatekeepers into force multipliers.

When Agents Need Permission
Tools in Context
When Agents Need Permission

How checkpoint-based tools build organizational trust through approval workflows that teach teams what agents can reliably handle.

December — Issue #7

When Organizations Commit to Agents They Don't Yet Have
The Signal
When Organizations Commit to Agents They Don't Yet Have

Organizations restructured around agent capabilities before infrastructure exists to support them—revealing how transformation happens through commitment, not readiness.

What 98% Reliability Actually Costs
Field Dispatch
What 98% Reliability Actually Costs

Operating web agents at scale demands invisible expertise—pattern recognition, tribal knowledge, and cognitive load that no dashboard captures but determines whether reliability holds.

When to Automate and When to Keep Humans in the Loop
Field Guide
When to Automate and When to Keep Humans in the Loop

Workflows aren't monolithic—they're bundles of decision types that each demand different infrastructure, verification, and human involvement to actually work at scale.

December — Issue #6

Browser Automation vs. Web Agents
Field Guide
Browser Automation vs. Web Agents

Browser automation scripts break when sites redesign; web agents reason through changes but cost more—choosing wrong means maintenance hell or blown budgets at scale.

When HTML Forked: The Compromise That Never Ended
Infrastructure Inflections
When HTML Forked: The Compromise That Never Ended

The 1996 browser wars split HTML between semantic structure and visual presentation—a compromise that became permanent, creating the ambiguity web automation navigates today.

December — Issue #5

When Extraction Succeeds But Data Goes Wrong
Field Guide
When Extraction Succeeds But Data Goes Wrong

Extraction pipelines run smoothly while data quietly becomes wrong—here's how to catch quality drift before it corrupts decisions at scale.

Trust Declines as Delegation Scales—The Paradox of Crossing Over
Threshold Moments
Trust Declines as Delegation Scales—The Paradox of Crossing Over

Organizations delegate to agents they don't trust—the threshold moment where verification questions become orchestration questions, revealing how expertise transforms into infrastructure design despite persistent discomfort.

November — Issue #4

Production Teaches What Staging Cannot
Parallax View
Production Teaches What Staging Cannot

Production reveals what staging cannot teach—how the adversarial, constantly changing web actually behaves under real operational conditions.

What Staging Actually Tests
Parallax View
What Staging Actually Tests

Staging validates your code logic perfectly while missing the real test: whether your assumptions about the web match reality.

The API Exists. The Data Doesn't.
Operations Field Notes
The API Exists. The Data Doesn't.

APIs promise programmatic access but often exclude the data enterprises actually need, forcing hybrid approaches that combine official channels with browser-based collection at scale.

October — Issue #1

The Infrastructure That Doesn't Exist Yet
Threshold Moments
The Infrastructure That Doesn't Exist Yet

Engineering's shift from coding to orchestrating AI agents awaits unglamorous infrastructure work—observability, reliability guarantees, and institutional knowledge frameworks—that mostly doesn't exist yet at enterprise scale.

When "Check the Price" Means Check 48 Prices
Parallax View
When "Check the Price" Means Check 48 Prices

Tracking competitor pricing means checking dozens of personalized variants simultaneously, turning simple monitoring into complex infrastructure requiring continuous maintenance.

The Optimization That Made Monitoring Impossible
Parallax View
The Optimization That Made Monitoring Impossible

Platforms optimize for individual conversion, creating personalized experiences that make systematic competitive monitoring operationally impossible by design.

Consequence-Bounded Autonomy
Field Guide
Consequence-Bounded Autonomy

Agent autonomy isn't about technical capability—it's about mapping what happens when things go wrong and setting boundaries accordingly.

The Problem Infrastructure Can't Solve
Dual Lens
The Problem Infrastructure Can't Solve

We're building elaborate systems to make agents look human because the web resists programs—managing architectural tension, not resolving it.

When Infrastructure Becomes a Category
Dual Lens
When Infrastructure Becomes a Category

Browser automation crosses from feature to funded category, revealing where agent complexity actually lives and what becomes infrastructure next.

The Velocity Mismatch
Field Notes
The Velocity Mismatch

Organizations are deploying AI agents faster than they can build the governance infrastructure to manage them safely—and that gap is about to become the constraint that determines who scales and who stalls.

The Eight-Hour Agent Nobody's Running
The Signal
The Eight-Hour Agent Nobody's Running

AWS built agents that run for eight hours, but nobody's figured out what to do with them yet—revealing the gap between infrastructure capability and organizational readiness to trust autonomous execution at scale.

November — Issue #0

CSS Grid Lanes Ships: The Web Finally Gets Native Masonry Layout
CSS Grid Lanes Ships: The Web Finally Gets Native Masonry Layout
Nora Kaplan profile
Nora Kaplan

Nora Kaplan is a technology writer and advisor focused on human-AI collaboration and organizational transformation. After studying human-computer interaction and working in product design at a high-growth collaboration platform, she witnessed firsthand how teams adopt new ways of working and what makes software trustworthy at scale. Now she helps companies think through how automation changes team structure, decision-making, and the nature of knowledge work—writing with optimism about technology's potential while remaining realistic about adoption challenges.