Notebook
Essays, short stories, and other writing that isn’t a working paper. Pieces that emerged for their own reasons, in whatever shape fit them best. These sit here rather than on The Practical Thinker or in the working papers because they’re closer to reflection than reference.
Thoughts and responses welcome — andrewbruce@me.com.
The continuity plan is ready. The people it assumes may have already left.
Staffing, AI-dependent businesses and critical services: what survives a loss of model access, and how to prepare a workable alternative.
AI can make us more capable. Whether it makes us more secure depends on who owns the machinery.
A long look at AI, work, ownership and power, with six questions for thinking about the transition, redrawn evidence charts and an interactive Power Shift Explorer.
Conversational analytics is moving from the demo to the Monday meeting. The economics change when the tenth person asks the same question.
What grows when usage goes up tenfold, why the warehouse is often the bigger meter, and an interactive model for finding where author, validate, reuse starts paying for itself.
Better, Faster, Cheaper and Safer are a useful start. The awkward bit is deciding what counts.
A practical automation assessment, including hidden review costs, difficult exceptions and the work behind a job title.
AI makes the interface cheap. Access is the real architectural test.
Frontier LLMs can turn accessible data into useful tools in hours or minutes. Managed extracts prove the opportunity. Real-time work reveals who owns the drawbridge.
The AI may not need a cleverer prompt. It may need a clearer job.
A practical and mildly suspicious look at better AI briefs, cleaner context, teams of assistants, and the awkward discovery that you are now their manager.
How enterprise AI gets chosen at 9 pm
Enterprise AI choices are often shaped after hours, where practitioners discover which tools are capable, usable, context-rich, and worth the meter.
What actually dies, what survives, and who gets handed the bill
SaaS is not dying. It is being forced to reveal what customers were really paying for — and whether the moat beneath the interface is real, or merely inconvenient.
A Magical Adventure of Discovery
When an old map wakes in Mara Vale’s bedroom, it reveals a moonlit road to her missing grandfather, Poppy—and a warning about the thirteenth bell.
The Practical Thinker
A wry Practical Thinker piece on AI, judgement, cognitive debt, and the small professional miracle of noticing when a beautiful answer is solving the wrong thing.
The Magic of Unfinished Things
Roen Veck is paid to finish dangerous magical works left undone. In a village bell tower, a stair has been returning climbers to the wrong places for forty-three years.
My Velcro girl, my gentle giant
A remembrance of Freyja — a five-year-old Great Dane with the heart of something ancient and the softness of a whisper. A shadow, a leaning weight, a love carried for the rest of a life.
A Life in Architecture
A philosophical journal in the language of hardware, software, and the long work of integration. Fourteen sections, from boot sequence through midlife load to current state — a framework for anyone who has had to quietly maintain the code they inherited.
Written for anyone who has lived long enough with early trauma, ADHD, or both, to notice that the agents running below their thinking were written for an environment that no longer exists.