AI on the Clock

Bites

One idea per post, in plain English. What a thing actually is, where it came from, and why it became infrastructure while nobody was looking.

Twice a week. Each one is a carousel on LinkedIn first, then a proper page here with the slides and the argument written out. Looking for the daily news instead? That is Pulse.

• Nº 008 — The AI Productivity Paradox: Why Adoption Isn't Showing Up in the Numbers

  Record AI spending, real individual gains, limited enterprise impact — the same pattern Robert Solow named in 1987. What the productivity J-curve says about why the payoff takes longer than the rollout.

  PRODUCTIVITY · 31 August 2026

• Nº 007 — Human-in-the-Loop Isn't a Brake — It's How You Design Autonomy

  Full autonomy or full manual is the wrong question. Three modes of human oversight, when to use each, and the four questions that decide how much rope to give your agents.

  GOVERNANCE · 24 August 2026

• Nº 006 — What Is the Lethal Trifecta? The Pattern Behind AI Agent Attacks

  Private data access, untrusted content, and external communication — each fine alone, dangerous combined. Simon Willison's name for the pattern behind most AI agent security incidents, and how to break it.

  SECURITY · 17 August 2026

• Nº 005 — What is Harness in AI

  Everyone is debating: “Which model is better?” But the same model can go from 38% to 66% success when you change the system around it. The difference isn’t the model — it’s the scaffolding built around it. It’s called the harness. 👇 — Agent = Model + Harness The model is the brain: it reads context and makes decisions. The harness is everything around it — tools, sandbox, memory, verification, guardrails, logging, and execution. A raw model can’t write a file, run your tests, remember what happened last week, or recover from a crash. All of that comes from what’s built around it. As LangChain’s Vivek Trivedy put it: “If you’re not the model, you’re the harness.”

  ENGINEERING · 11 August 2026

• Nº 004 — What Is Shadow AI? Why Banning AI Tools Makes the Risk Worse

  Employees are already using AI at work through personal accounts and browser extensions nobody approved. Banning it does not remove the risk — it removes your visibility of it.

  SECURITY · 6 August 2026

• Nº 003 — What Is MCP (Model Context Protocol)? A Plain-English Guide

  Model Context Protocol is an open standard for how AI applications connect to tools and data — the USB-C port for AI. What it is, where it came from, and why it became infrastructure in eighteen months.

  INFRASTRUCTURE · 4 August 2026

• Nº 002 — 5 Hard Questions About Your AI Strategy

  If you cannot answer these five, you do not have a strategy — you have a budget line and some enthusiasm.

  STRATEGY · 30 July 2026

• Nº 001 — The RISEN Framework: A Repeatable Way to Write Prompts

  Role, Instructions, Steps, End goal, Narrowing — five slots that turn prompting from guesswork into something you can hand to a colleague.

  PROMPTING · 28 July 2026