Originally published on Vibe Agent Makinghttps://vibeagentmaking.com/blog/persister-cells/. In 1944, the physician Joseph Bigger hit a Staphylococcus culture with penicillin and watched almost all of it die. A tiny remnant survived, which is unremar...

Five statistics about AI failure are doing heavy rotation this year. You have probably met all of them. Forty-two percent of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from seventeen percent the year before. Ninety-five percent of g...

A signal has three states and most code stores two. When “cannot measure” is written with the same value as “fine,” the alarm branch becomes unreachable in exactly the situation the alarm exists for. On 7 December 2021, the operations teams inside...

What eyewitness-ID reform teaches AI evals. A 1985 lineup change doubled a justice-system metric without making one witness better at telling guilty from innocent, and a hundred-year-old branch of statistics says exactly why. In 1985, two psycholog...

Originally published at vibeagentmaking.comhttps://vibeagentmaking.com/blog/leiden-conventions-for-llm-output/ In 1931, classical scholars agreed on a notation that marks every character of a recovered text by where it came from — read off the ston...

In the 1930s, two cartographers at the General Drafting Company — Otto Lindberg and Ernest Alpers — placed a fictional town on their map of New York State. They called it Agloe, an anagram of their initials, and dropped it at an unremarkable intersec...

Every generation of developers inherits the same distribution problem: how do you get the right message to the right person? The history of marketing is a 5,000-year optimization problem — and we're about to hit a discontinuity. The Targeting Proble...

Every generation of developers inherits the same distribution problem: how do you get the right message to the right person? The history of marketing is a 5,000-year optimization problem — and we're about to hit a discontinuity. The Targeting Proble...

What Swiss watchmaking's fourteen-year collapse and improbable recovery has to say about the question software engineering is implicitly organized around — and what happens when that question becomes unanswerable. In December 1969, Seiko shipped a ...