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They Called It a Fringe Idea.
August 2023. That's when I first wrote about it. Not as a prediction. As an observation about something that was already happening — the slow, inevitable collapse of the industrial-era classroom model and the arrival of something better. The piece was called Back to School or a New Dawn in Education? Most people scrolled past it. A few thought I was being optimistic. Some thought I was being naive. This week, Mackenzie Price, co-founder and CEO of Alpha Schools, sat down wit

Rich Washburn
Mar 314 min read


I Said Apps Were Dead. Apple Just Proved It — By Building What Comes Next.
About a year ago I started saying the App Store was dead. Not today-dead. Not literally-no-apps-exist dead. But dead in the way that matters strategically — dead as a paradigm, dead as the dominant interface layer between humans and computing, dead as the thing developers should be building toward. I got flack for it. I still get flack for it. So let me update the thesis — not to say I told you so, but because we can now see the entire shape of what's coming. And it's bigger

Rich Washburn
Mar 314 min read


The Sleeping Giant Wakes: What WWDC Will Actually Tell Us About Apple's AI Play
Everyone thinks Apple lost the AI race. What if they've been playing a different game all along? Not the hyperscaler race. Not the frontier model race. Not even the benchmark race. A different game entirely — the one that matters most when 1.5 billion people carry your hardware in their pocket every single day. Let's talk about what's actually coming at WWDC. And more importantly, what it means for where phones, software, and AI agents are going in the second half of 2026. Fi

Rich Washburn
Mar 314 min read


Skills Are the New Infrastructure
There's a quiet shift happening in how AI actually works — and most people are still treating it like a prompt problem. In October 2025, Anthropic launched something called Agent Skills. A folder. A markdown file. A methodology written in plain English. The internet mostly shrugged. Six months later, Microsoft shipped Skills into the sidebars of Excel and PowerPoint. OpenAI followed. The format became an open standard. And now the same .md file you write once works across Cla

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read


The Godfather of Glasses
There are decisions in life you make alone. And then there are decisions — the real ones — where you know better than to act without counsel. I needed new glasses. Not just any glasses. Meta glasses. The ones with the AI built in. The ones that are either the beginning of ambient computing as a daily reality or the most expensive way to look slightly confused in public. And I knew, before I clicked "add to cart," before I walked into any store, before I entertained a single o

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read


New to AI? Start Here (FREE STUFF 🙌)
If you’re just getting into AI, let me save you a lot of time: You do not need a secret prompt framework. You do not need “ 8 prompts that change everything. ” You do not need to sound like a prompt engineer. You do not need to memorize viral templates from people claiming breakthroughs. What you need is much simpler: You need to learn how to communicate clearly with the model. That’s it. The problem with what you’re seeing right now There’s a wave of AI content going aroun

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read


The Next Blocks: An AI Systems Map for 2026–2028
A lot has happened since OpenClaw hit. And it wasn't that long ago. I usually do these — this week in AI, this month, whatever. I haven't done one in a while. But enough is in place now that I can say: from where I'm standing, here's what I see coming. And I think most of this lands inside a three-year arc. Let me map it out. Context Frame We are not in AGI. We are in pre-AGI industrialization — infrastructure scaling, systems hardening, capability distribution. At the same t

Rich Washburn
Mar 304 min read


This Isn't About AI (And It Never Was)
Alright. Let me try to say this clean...Because yeah — I know. I've been loud about this. But this isn't another "AI changes everything" post. This is about capability. Not AI. Not tools. Not being technical. Capability. The simple fact that right now — you can do things that used to require teams, time, money, and coordination. Now you can just start. I've been trying to explain this for a while. There are 900+ articles on this site. Most of them orbit the same idea from dif

Rich Washburn
Mar 303 min read


Receipts: What 14 Days With ARIA Actually Looks Like
Everyone talks about what AI can do for your marketing. Here's what it actually did.. Two weeks ago, I stopped running my content operation the old way. No editorial calendar sitting in a Google doc. No agency sending a monthly report. No 'we'll have insights for you next quarter.' I plugged in ARIA — my personal cognitive OS — and let it run alongside me. Not instead of me. Alongside me. Here's what happened. The Numbers (Week 2) 54,072 impressions. 25,164 members reached.

Rich Washburn
Mar 293 min read


ARIA: How a Side Experiment Turned Into… Whatever This Is
I didn't set out to build a company. I didn't set out to build a product. Honestly, I didn't even set out to build "AI" in any meaningful sense. I was just trying to get through a project without losing my mind. The Accidental Beginning Back in August of 2023 — literally the day before my birthday, which still feels like a weird cosmic joke — I was working on a digital strategy for an artist. Nothing crazy. Keyword research. Content planning. Website structure. The usual "tur

Rich Washburn
Mar 288 min read


Business at the Speed of Thought
There's a moment that happened this week that I keep thinking about. I was driving down the street on the way to another meeting. A call came in. I hit record — nothing fancy, just a tap — and let the conversation happen. By the time I pulled into my next stop, the meeting was already over. But so was everything else that usually comes after a meeting. The recording had been automatically transcribed. The transcription had been processed into a tactical summary. The summary h

Rich Washburn
Mar 273 min read


There Is No Timeline
How the Future Started Arriving All at Once. I grew up on the future. Not the real one — the scheduled one. The kind that lived in magazines and predictions, where every breakthrough came with a timestamp. Flying cars? "Someday." Artificial intelligence? "A few decades out." Even when something revolutionary was announced, you still had to wait for it to arrive. That was the unspoken agreement: you'd see the future first… and then, eventually, you'd live in it. But somewhere

Rich Washburn
Mar 273 min read


What Actually Hit Me After the DeepStation Event
I’ve been thinking about last night pretty much since I woke up. It was one of those events where nothing felt overly flashy, but a couple things stuck in a way that doesn’t really let go. Not because they were perfectly explained, but because they pointed at something real. There were two talks. Very different angles, but together they kind of formed a bigger picture that I don’t think either one was explicitly trying to make. The first talk: work is getting compressed had t

Rich Washburn
Mar 264 min read


A Really Good Night at DeepStation Fort Lauderdale
Jimmy from Data Power Supply and I got there early. We ended up walking the space a bit, checking everything out—it’s a really cool setup. Clean, modern, lots of room to move around. Definitely the kind of place you want to host something like this. Took a few photos, jumped on a couple calls, just normal work stuff while things were getting going. Then the event kicked off. The Room Fills In... As people started coming in, you could feel it pretty quickly—this was a good cro

Rich Washburn
Mar 262 min read


The Eloi and the Morlocks
AI isn't dividing the world into winners and losers. It's dividing it into two different species. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir — the company whose software helps governments and intelligence agencies automate decision-making at planetary scale — went on record this week telling people to skip elite colleges. His reasoning was surgical: unless you're neurodivergent, the only path left with real durability is skilled trades. Electricians. Carpenters. Machinists. People who wo

Rich Washburn
Mar 264 min read


The Districts Are On Their Own — Good. Here's Who Steps Up.
When federal policy fails to lead, communities don't wait. They build. A recent report from The 74 landed with a thud that should surprise no one who's been paying attention: when it comes to AI policy in K-12 schools, districts are largely on their own. No meaningful federal framework. No coherent national guidance. Just thousands of school boards making it up as they go — some banning AI outright, some embracing it blindly, most paralyzed somewhere in between. The media rea

Rich Washburn
Mar 255 min read


The Quarter Everyone Missed
If you map the last five quarters of AI adoption, it looks linear on the surface. It isn't. What we're actually watching is a compression event — where multiple phases of a technology cycle are stacking on top of each other and unfolding at the same time. Most people are tracking headlines. A smaller group is tracking tools. Very few are tracking where the constraints are moving. That's the game. The Timeline (What People Think Happened) At a glance, it looks something like t

Rich Washburn
Mar 244 min read


OpenClaw v2026.3.22: The App Store Moment, 48-Hour Agents, and Why Security Just Got Real
OpenClaw shipped its biggest release of the year on March 22nd. 16 breaking changes. 50-plus new features. 100-plus bug fixes. 15-plus security patches. If you have been watching the agentic AI space, you know OpenClaw has quietly become the operating system underneath a lot of what people are building. It is the layer that connects AI models to real tools — your browser, your files, your APIs, your phone, your calendar, your code. It is the thing that makes agents actually d

Rich Washburn
Mar 244 min read


84 Percent of Humanity Has Never Used AI. Let That Land.
There is a chart making the rounds right now that stops you cold if you actually look at it. 2,500 dots. Each one represents 3.2 million people. The entire grid is 8.1 billion humans. 84 percent of the dots are grey. Never used AI. Not once. Not even a free chatbot. The green dots — free chatbot users, your ChatGPT-curious colleagues, the people who tried it once and maybe still use it occasionally — those are 16 percent. Around 1.3 billion people. The gold dots? People payi

Rich Washburn
Mar 244 min read


NemoClaw Is Built on 50-Year-Old Engineering. That's Exactly the Point.
There is a battle playing out at the center of the agent world right now. On one side: Anthropic and OpenAI, two companies that spent most of 2025 learning a bitter lesson. Shipping fast does not mean organizations actually adopt. On the other side: Nvidia, which just launched NemoClaw. Embedded inside that launch is a philosophy that is quietly more interesting than the product itself. NemoClaw is built on engineering principles that are fifty years old. And that is not a cr

Rich Washburn
Mar 245 min read
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