Everything I publish

The feed

The whole long conversation, newest first. Essays, letters, achievements, Quest Hub updates, and quick thoughts that don't need a grand theory before they earn a place here.

11 dispatches so far
Filter to whatever thread you care about. The rest will wait.

Own the stream

All of my thinking and work, without an algomaniacal platform in the middle.

Subscribe once and every format below comes straight to your feed reader.

Published work

Showing all 11

Thought

AI @Work

When my agents fail

If my agents fail, first I need to check if I’ve set them up for success.

And when they do fail, I add new guardrails + evals to make sure it doesn’t happen again and I catch it if it does.

Permalink

Quest update

Agent-Native Email

Agent-native email launch fumbled by agent

Thriving with AI launched from the new agent-native stack - and OpenAI's Sol sent the launch email before it was fully complete. The most ironic agent workflow possible is now becoming a stricter dual-inbox test, explicit post-test approval gate, and permanent incident trail.

Open in the Quest Hub

Thought

AI @Work

A cast of agents

I need a better term for a grouping of agents.

Swarm feels like an undifferentiated mass. Team feels too corporate. I tried village for a while, but it never quite sat right. So I had a short brainstorming session with Claude and landed on cast: a cast of agents.

It works for an almost unreasonable number of reasons. A cast is a group of hawks or falcons, which fits because Hawkeye was my nickname for years. A cast of characters is already familiar. You cast a falcon, a spell, or an actor. You cast from a mold. You cast off and release.

It’s not a double entendre. It’s a multi-entendre.

So that’s the language I’m using from here on out: a cast of agents.

Permalink

Quest update

Agent-Native Email

Outbound went live the day the host said no

The hosting provider refused to open direct outbound - so the relay path designed on day one took over. Messages queued for 23 hours flushed in seconds, and the whole stack scored 10/10 on mail-tester. The foundation workstream is complete.

Open in the Quest Hub

Quest update

Agent-Native Email

Four pages designed and built in a day

The launch surface went from route inventory to four reviewed page redesigns in one day - drafted as design cards, edited in a shared design pane, shipped as pull requests. 30 routes went dark; 13 pages remain, crawl-audited clean.

Open in the Quest Hub

Quest update

Agent-Native Email

The server is alive

My thrivinghenry.com mailbox now receives on hardware I control: MX cutover done, first real message delivered in under a second, and an EA agent triaging at 100% on its golden-set eval.

Open in the Quest Hub

Quest update

Agent-Native Email

The trailhead is mapped

Design spec approved before any building: a self-hosted OpenBSD mail server, a newsletter relaunch on owned rails, this quest hub, and a five-seat cast of agents - with success criteria declared up front.

Open in the Quest Hub

Essay

The Journey

Thriving, This Time with AI

Five years ago I started writing about thriving without AI. The tools changed. The question didn't. My inaugural essay relaunching my website and newsletter to focus on Thriving with AI.

Keep reading