Writing Team
There's a finding in this issue that should unsettle anyone building web agents. Researchers tested how dark patterns affect agent behavior and discovered that larger, more capable models are more susceptible to manipulation. Smarter made it worse. We kept running into that inversion everywhere we looked. The reliability problems that actually bite in production live in the environment the model operates in: a web that pushes back, system boundaries nobody designed for, organizations going blind to their own health as humans step away. Making the model better doesn't fix any of it.
Sable Whitford
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.
Sevda Polat
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.