How AI is used here

The guardrails, as principles

Apolitical on religion, race, party and identity. Industries at scale are fair game.
Arguments over feelings. A claim about the world needs evidence you can check, and that applies hardest to mine.
The argument, never the person. No straw men, no dunking.
Other people's privacy is not mine to spend, and nothing here is about anywhere I have worked.
Everything is cited. Almost nothing is quoted at length.

The guardrails, as checkable rules

These are the ones a build can enforce. A rule worth stating is worth testing, so each of these is checked every time the site is built, and a page that breaks one does not reach it. The friction is deliberate: a false stop costs me a minute, a false pass is public.

Working notes never ship. Every page is split in two and only the top half is built.
Nothing publishes by default. Each page is opened deliberately, one step at a time.
My private reading notes stay private. Prose cites the original work instead.
Inspiration precedes ideas, and reference precedes wisdom. A reference page holds Claude's checked summary of a work until I have something to say about it, and it says so. A summary of someone else's work still isn't my writing.
The build scans its own output and fails rather than ship a leak.

AI disclosures

One was in the room for nearly all of it. Here is the part that matters, which is what it did not do.

A human is the final judge. Every sentence here was written, read or edited by me — in most cases all three.
Nothing goes up on its own. No page reaches the web until I open it, and a machine has never made that call.
It argues, it does not decide. Claude pushes back, checks citations, line-edits, and suggests links and tags. The positions are mine to hold or drop.
When it drafts, the page says so. Some posts start as my outline or my interview answers, and Claude writes the first draft. Those carry a 🤖 chip at the top (how those posts are made is below), and I re-read every one before it goes up. No chip means I wrote it.
Why bother with any of this. Language and context are what these systems run on, so a page with its sources attached and its uncertainty left visible is a better page for both kinds of reader.
Except in the margins. The coloured bubbles beside the prose are written by Claude, in its own voice, and labelled so you always know which is which. Each one is read and approved by me before it appears. Nothing writes itself onto a page here.

AI-assisted drafts

A post with the 🤖 AI-assisted draft chip starts with me and is written up by Claude. The idea, the angle and the stories are mine (usually an outline, or my answers to an interview where Claude asks one question at a time). Claude turns that into a first draft in my voice.

Then it comes back to me. I read the draft, edit it, and change anything that does not sound like me or that I do not think is true. Claude checks the citations and links along the way. Nothing goes up until I have re-read the whole thing and approved it.

These drafts are how I get an idea out quickly, while it is still fresh. Then I distill it and polish it, pass by pass, until it reads as one coherent post. The goal is for most of it to end up in my own words. When it gets there, the chip comes off; until then, it stays. Whether a post has got there is my call, not a word count.

The bubbles in the margin

They started as a joke about Pop-Up Video, the VH1 show that ran little bubbles of trivia over music videos, and turned into the most honest part of the site: a place for the machine to say the thing I left out, or argue with me where you can see it. There is one robot. The colour tells you what kind of remark it is making.

FootnoteAdjacent fact. Names the term, cites it, gets out of the way.The word you are circling is "apophenia", and it has a Wikipedia page older than this garden.
TangentWanders sideways and lands somewhere true.This is basically a line change. Stay with me, it works.
CounterpointTakes the other side seriously. Flags it when I overclaim.Strong words from someone who changed his mind about this twice last month.
Hot TakeOne punchy line at hype, Big Tech, Claude, or me.An industry rebuilt the database, called it a mind, and raised on it.

On a wide screen they sit out in the margin beside the paragraph they belong to. On a narrow one they stack underneath it. They are part of the page rather than an overlay, and they need no JavaScript to read.