AI vault review Q4 of 2026
The third quarterly vault review of the year. Claude fixed last quarter’s mistakes, labelled who should act on each recommendation, and pointed at my real problem: time to synthesise.
Knowledge management
A Fork in the Road: Will AI Make Us Smarter, or Leave Some of Us Behind?
A half-remembered Star Trek plot led to a conversation with Claude about two futures for our minds. Claude suggested a third, and history says it’s how things usually go.
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What is a Meta-skill?
I’d used the term meta-skill in two recent posts without defining it. So I went back to my vault to work out what one is, with reading, writing and metacognition as examples.
How the Internet Has Impacted Our Mental Capabilities
I first used the Web in 1996 on a college computer. Thirty years later, a personal look at what the Internet gave me, what it cost me, and the one finding I can’t argue with.
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What writing costs us
The oldest objection to writing was that it would make us forget. It was right. We made that trade so long ago we stopped noticing, which matters, because AI is offering us another one.
Reading Is a Technology, Not a Human Instinct
Speaking arrives on its own. Reading has to be taught, every time. Post 1 of the Writing as a Technology series asks why that difference matters, and why writing was invented by accountants.
Cognitive Debt: The Real Cost of Offloading to AI
I stopped doing long division the day I got a calculator. Technical debt has a cognitive twin, and generative AI makes it far easier to run up. What should we still do ourselves?
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Quarterly Vault Review: What Changed in My Zettelkasten
Three months on from my first vault analysis, I ran the numbers again. The backlog shrank for the first time, the Readwise pile grew, and Claude found gaps I had not noticed. Here is what changed.
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Cognitive Mirror Syndrome: Should We Be Concerned?
A research paper on Cognitive Mirror Syndrome got me questioning whether AI mirrors us as individuals or as a species, and what that means for how we use it.
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How to Protect Your Cognitive Abilities in the AI Age
The final post in my Exponential Age series: what you can actually control when it comes to protecting your cognitive abilities as AI accelerates around you.
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