Alex Rossie

I build companies and I fly aircraft. I write here about AI, markets, and history.

  • The company selling 'safe AI agents' left its own front door checking a flag instead of a person

    Manifold Security showed that Claude for Chrome never checks whether a click came from a person, only that one arrived. Eight releases and two months later the hole was still there, byte for byte, while Anthropic's own tracker read Resolved. What a permission gate is for, and what it costs to trust the flag instead of the artifact.

    Aug 10, 2026 / 1,071 words

  • A new MIT paper found the variable the AI-jobs debate keeps missing: the shape of the job

    Five economists at MIT and Microsoft model AI automation as contiguous chains of steps, and all three of the model's predictions hold up in Claude-usage data. Skill still decides whether a step can be automated; adjacency decides whether the job around it gets swallowed. The ADP payroll gradient and a thriving radiology profession keep the claim honest.

    Aug 6, 2026 / 1,395 words

  • What the S&P 500 admits about AI (when the SEC is reading)

    MIT FutureTech scored 510 S&P 500 firms on ten years of 10-K filings, the annual report a CEO personally certifies. Adoption quadrupled in three years, margins show a J, productivity shows only the dip, and the record cannot yet tell a payoff in transit from one that never comes.

    Aug 3, 2026 / 1,442 words

  • The nervous system of your codebase is a markdown file

    A census of 2,853 repositories shows the file coding agents actually read is a plain markdown context file. Code is the musculature; the context file is the nervous system, and it earns its keep carrying the constraints the code cannot say about itself.

    Jul 30, 2026 / 1,014 words

  • Nobody designed the landing gear to talk to the rudder. A crack did it anyway.

    A fatal training crash at Parafield, an emergency order from EASA, and what the FAA's DA42 directive actually writes: a ban that dies at the first inspection, and a cycle meter that survives it.

    Jul 27, 2026 / 946 words

All essays