About the framework

Where you fly, and the airspace you fly in

A membership running from clerical chat users to LLM researchers cannot be served by one undifferentiated feed, and advice that works in a six-person startup is actively wrong inside a corporate change-control process. So everything published here carries a rung and a setting.

A rung describes a capability, never a tool. "Can get a reliable answer out of a model and knows when not to trust it" will still be true in three years; "knows how to use a particular tool" is stale by spring. Tool names belong in the content, which is cheap to update, and never in the framework, which is expensive.

Altitude · what you can do with AI

Read from the ground up. One question only: how much of the work do you hand over? Choose your own rung — no test, no score, no ranking against anyone else.

Three of these share one mountain — the trail, the ridge above it, and the launch you run off the top. The fourth is a different aircraft, not a higher ridge. Choose where you actually are: climbing is not automatically the right move, and in the wrong airspace it is the wrong one.

Jets Above the weather

You work on what is not settled yet.

Research, ethics, evaluation, agents defending against agents — the machinery itself and the arguments about it. Not further up the same mountain but a different aircraft entirely: a few thousand people rather than a few hundred million. Most of us will never fly one and lose nothing by it.

What it gives the rest of us Early warning. What is contested up here today is a risk-committee question in eighteen months. The society's return on its Jets is hearing it first, and hearing it in terms a board can act on.

Below, one mountain and one continuous route

Paragliders Thermals

Teams of AI work for you.

You set the objective and let it run — several agents, many steps, real tools and real data, without reading each move. The leverage is genuine and so is the exposure. The skill at this altitude is reading the conditions, and knowing when not to launch.

Next rung Evidence. Being able to show the thing worked, and show when it did not, before anyone else is asked to trust it.
Mountaineers Ridges

AI builds for you.

You hand over the making, not only the asking — the draft, the model, the deck, the code — and you read every step before it goes anywhere. Still a minority, and the point at which AI stops being a better search box and becomes capacity.

Next rung Letting it work on your own material — your files, your data, your tools — rather than only on what fits inside a chat window.
Hikers The trail

You ask. AI answers.

An assistant that has read everything and remembers nothing. You bring the question, the context and the judgement; it brings speed. Where almost all of us start, and a great deal of genuinely valuable work never needs to leave it.

Next rung Treating the conversation as a working session rather than a lookup — hand over the document, the constraint and the audience before you ask.

Airspace · the organisation you are in

Open Country

Technical startup

Nobody to ask. You can ship to production this afternoon, build rather than buy, and change your mind next week.

Binding constraint Judgement, not permission. The risk is moving fast in the wrong direction and only noticing at scale.

Marked Trails

Boutique or executive office

A handful of people, no IT function, no one to delegate to. Almost everything is bought rather than built.

Binding constraint Time and vendor choice. The risk is paying for tools nobody embeds into actual work.

Controlled Airspace

Corporate with IT and risk oversight

Clearance before movement. Procurement, data classification, model approval, audit trail.

Binding constraint Permission and evidence. The risk is a pilot that works beautifully and never clears review.

Why both

Take one capability: getting a model to work over your own documents. A Mountaineer in Open Country does it in an afternoon. The same Mountaineer on Marked Trails should almost certainly buy it. In Controlled Airspace the technical work is the easy part — what matters is which data classifications permit it and what evidence the risk function will ask for. Same altitude, same capability, three completely different articles.

Your own placement

Set your rung and your airspace

It takes two taps and no test. Everything published here is tagged with a rung and a setting, so a placement is simply the filter that stops you reading advice written for somebody else's constraints. You can change it whenever you like, and Prefer not to say is a real answer.

Set up my framework → Members sign in · an invite code joins