How have software-development commit trends shifted across repository creation,…
What do high-quality longitudinal studies (2019–2026) show about directional shifts and current baseline ranges for repository creation rate, Lines of Code (LOC) velocity, rework share, project abando…
What Institutional Designs Create Low-Cost Help-Seeking Without Embarrassment,…
Which institutional design choices create persistently low-cost help-seeking spaces where workers can ask questions, admit uncertainty, and seek guidance without expecting embarrassment, punishment, o…
What Are the Micro-Transaction Costs of Internal Knowledge Sourcing?
What micro-transaction costs are borne by knowledge seekers and providers during internal peer-to-peer transfers, and how do these costs shift the choice between self-solving ("make") and help-seeking…
Why Do Trust-Based Institutions Outperform Incentive Schemes for Knowledge…
Why do explicit transactional incentives for sharing often decay or backfire, while trust-based institutions, stable rules and norms that make repeated sharing safe and expected, sustain lower long-ru…
How Do Asset Specificity and Information Asymmetry Block Knowledge Transfer?
How do highly specific expert knowledge assets, knowledge investments whose value depends heavily on a particular context or relationship, create information asymmetries, situations where experts know…
Longitudinal persistence rates after gap closure for low-code applications,…
What longitudinal evidence exists on persistence rates after the original gap is closed for low-code applications, bots, and agents in live enterprise estates?
LLM-First Policy Clarification and Institutional Knowledge Atrophy
How does shifting from peer policy clarification to Large Language Model (LLM)-first interaction affect institutional memory transfer, mentoring, and long-term policy expertise?
Information Technology (IT) throughput capacity as a constraint on unmet…
What is the empirical relationship between Information Technology (IT) throughput capacity and the rate at which unmet operational capability needs accumulate across comparable organisations, and what…
Temporary Automation Demand Persistence and Core Capability Investment…
What evidence exists that temporary automation workarounds displace investment in core software delivery, and what is the observed persistence rate of those workarounds after the underlying systems ca…
Empirical evidence on rollout of organisation-wide low-code and no-code programs
What does peer-reviewed and independently verified empirical evidence reveal about the outcomes, success factors, governance models, and failure modes of organisation-wide low-code or no-code (LCNC) p…
Separated Risk, Cost, and Benefits Accountability Across Business Units
What failure modes have been empirically observed in organisations where accountability for risk, operational cost, and benefits realisation are held in separate business units (BUs) rather than co-lo…
Project-Based Demand Governance With Product-Structured IT Teams
What failure modes have been empirically observed in organisations where demand is managed through a project-based model while information technology (IT) teams are structured and operated as product…
Customer-Segment Demand Prioritisation Against Domain-Based IT Teams
What failure modes have been empirically observed when organisations prioritise information technology (IT) work through customer segments, for example consumer, enterprise, or government cohorts, but…
Overlapping and Absent Accountability at Strategic and IT Layers
What failure modes have been empirically observed in organisations where accountability is either overlapping, two or more parties hold the same accountability, or absent, no party owns a given area,…
What is Anthropic's '4D' framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) fluency,…
What is Anthropic's "4D" framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) fluency, what do each of the four Ds, Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence, mean in practice, and how does this frame…
Graph database landscape
For the hosted graph database platforms identified in the 2026 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) knowledge-ontology research, Neo4j AuraDB, Amazon Neptune, Stardog Cloud, Ontotext GraphDB, and Memgraph Clo…
Control deficiencies from bypassing designated workforce record platforms
What control deficiencies are most common when designated workforce record platforms are bypassed by spreadsheet, presentation, and list-based shadow workflows?
Taxonomy criteria: process inefficiency versus hidden control and dependency…
Which explicit criteria best distinguish ordinary process inefficiency from hidden control and dependency risk in workforce-capacity and skill-tracking workflows?
Process-Risk-Control (PRC) scoring impacts from unstandardized workforce…
How should inherent risk, meaning exposure before relying on controls, and control effectiveness, meaning the demonstrated reliability of the mitigating control, scores in a PRC library change when wo…
Language Server Protocol (LSP)-style policy surfaces and workforce taxonomies…
How can workforce-capacity and skills-taxonomy structures integrate with a Language Server Protocol (LSP)-style policy diagnostic surface to detect persistent capability mismatches automatically in en…
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP)…
How do missing provenance, lineage, and change-history controls in Microsoft Lists, Excel, and PowerPoint workforce artifacts conflict with NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 integrity-related controls?
Key-person dependency and Basel execution, delivery, and process-management…
How should key-person dependency in workforce-critical processes be mapped to execution, delivery, and process-management risk categories in Basel Committee framing?
Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), International Organization for…
How do Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 31000, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) frameworks classify risk whe…
Build vs improve tradeoff
Given constrained engineering capacity, how should organisations allocate effort between (1) building features within an existing system and (2) improving the system itself (tooling, process, architec…
What are the primary behavioural and structural drivers of unsanctioned AI…
What are the primary behavioural and structural drivers of shadow Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption, meaning unsanctioned use of AI tools without formal approval or oversight, in enterprises after…
What tiered human oversight models maintain meaningful human-in-the-loop (HITL)…
Under high-volume deployment of multi-step Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, what factors cause human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight to degrade into rubber-stamping, meaning approval without genuine…
What metrics beyond code acceptance rates best capture net organisational value…
What metrics beyond code acceptance rates and lines of code best capture net organisational value when Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding tools such as GitHub Copilot are adopted with productivity ma…
How do coupled enterprise risks manifest differently in agentic Artificial…synthesis
How do the coupled enterprise risks, capability debt, incentive-driven shadow Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption, skill decay, and oversight failure, manifest differently in agentic AI, meaning aut…
How can organisational capability debt be rigorously defined and measured as a…
How can capability debt, the accumulated organisational deficit in review quality, judgment, process maturity, and skill inventory, be rigorously defined, measured, and tracked as a leading indicator…
To what degree does over-reliance on AI tools accelerate measurable skill decay…
To what degree and through what mechanisms does over-reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, particularly tools that can plan or act across multi-step workflows, accelerate measurable skill de…
What does the 2026 Harvard Business Review trendslop study and related…
What does the March 2026 Harvard Business Review (HBR) "trendslop" study reveal about positional bias, prompt-framing sensitivity, and context-insensitive bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generate…
What capability and control design is needed to mitigate incentive…
What capability and control design is needed, at enterprise scale, to mitigate incentive misalignment (where individuals are rewarded for bypassing governance), shadow Artificial Intelligence (AI) (AI…
What principles and governance practices enable sustainable, high-quality…synthesis
What principles and governance practices, spanning harness design, task selection, human oversight, and open-source software (OSS) ecosystem health, enable sustainable, high-quality software developme…
What strategies are effective for open-source software maintainers dealing with…
What strategies are effective for open-source software (OSS) maintainers in filtering, managing, and sustaining project health against a rising volume of low-quality Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent…
What is the evidence for human oversight as an effective quality gate in…
What is the empirical evidence that human oversight, specifically the human bottleneck property of limited throughput and pain response, functions as an effective quality gate, meaning the control poi…
Prof Suraj Srinivasan's automation and augmentation scores
What does Prof Suraj Srinivasan's research framework for measuring Automation and Augmentation (A&A) scores across job roles and industries reveal about which roles face full Artificial Intelligence (…
Strategic versus tactical roles in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-augmented…
In an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-augmented software team, what is the optimal division of labour between the human developer, who owns strategic design, interface definition, and architectural overs…
What is the strongest evidence-based argument that investing in software…
What is the strongest evidence-based argument - drawing on Yann LeCun's primary sources, the formal methods literature, the systems capability debt research already in this corpus, and empirical evide…
When and how should human intervention be incorporated into Artificial…
When and how should human intervention be incorporated into AI-driven and automated workflows, specifically, what trigger conditions, intervention thresholds, escalation procedures, response time expe…
How do organisational incentives, culture, and behaviour influence adherence to…
How do organisational incentives, culture, and behaviour influence adherence to governance in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and low-code environments, specifically, what conditions drive teams to bypas…
Systems capability debt as the root cause of citizen development
What empirical evidence exists that systems capability debt, the accumulated gap between what people need from their systems and what those systems deliver across integration, functionality, data acce…
Systems capability debt, citizen development, and agentic AI risk
Does the synthesis of technical debt literature (Cunningham, Kruchten), systems capability research, transaction cost economics (Coase, Williamson), operational risk frameworks (Basel III/IV, Risk and…
Business-led low-code agent governance
Under what conditions does business-led low-code Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent creation produce durable organisational value versus technical debt and governance fragmentation, and what foundatio…
Historical technology adoption patterns as analogues for enterprise Artificial…
What can organisations learn from retrospectives of prior technology introductions, specifically personal computing, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), cloud computing, Robotic Process Automation (RP…
Enterprise AI platform operating models
What organisational structures do enterprises use to operate multiple Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms simultaneously, and what trade-offs emerge between (a) a single unified AI platform team, (…
Enterprise AI capability model for use-case maturity decisions
What enterprise-wide Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability model best supports deciding whether a candidate AI use case requires net-new foundational capabilities or can reuse capabilities already b…
Latest developments history
What trends, themes, and directional shifts are visible in the source material at `Latest-developments-/history` and related public sources, and what are the most plausible evidence-grounded speculati…
AI company hiring strategies
What do recent and historical job advertisements and hiring patterns at major Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies signal about their current and emerging strategic priorities, and where are the mos…
Shopify's Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy after the Red Queen memo
What is Shopify's explicit Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy as evidenced by Toby Lütke's "prove AI cannot do it before you hire" memo and follow-on operating decisions, and how has that strategy…
The shape of organisations when software is no longer the constraint
Inside an organisation that requires software to be built, integrated, and maintained (including Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) systems, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, and bespoke-built syst…
Rory Sutherland's core tenets
What are Rory Sutherland's core intellectual tenets, particularly around anti-bureaucracy, customer thinking, and behavioral economics, and what practical implications do they hold for business strate…
The measurement asymmetry
Why is measuring opportunity cost systematically harder than measuring direct costs, and what cognitive and structural mechanisms cause organisations to destroy value while claiming efficiency gains?
Customer contact as strategic signal
When customers contact a business, what are they actually seeking — and how should organisations decide between self-service automation and human interaction to maximise long-term customer value?
Cost reduction is not a strategy
Why is cost reduction insufficient as a business strategy, and how does framing artificial intelligence (AI) primarily as a cost-cutting tool risk destroying value through missed opportunities?
Against bureaucracy: dismantling control systems to focus on value and…
What does the synthesis of the Anti-Bureaucracy Manifesto and James Burnham's *The Managerial Revolution* reveal about how organisations can dismantle control systems and system waste while refocusing…
Bureaucracy growth and the boomer generation hypothesis
Who has written or researched the idea that the growth of bureaucratic functions — specifically Human Resources (HR), Finance, and Procurement — was led or significantly amplified by the baby boomer g…
The Software Factory
If the cost of producing high-quality, standardised, integrated software is approaching zero — as Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding agents and software factory patterns suggest — what must organisat…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents as finishers and synthesisers
What agent configurations, prompt strategies, orchestration patterns, and tooling choices allow an AI agent (or agent team) to act as a reliable *finisher* and *synthesiser* - completing work that a h…
How to best use awesome-copilot in this repo and across personal repos
What resources from `davidamitchell/awesome-copilot` — GitHub Copilot (GHC) instructions, skills, agents, workflows, hooks, and plugins — provide the most leverage when applied to this Research repo a…
Explore to exploit: the synthesis step that makes exploitation pay off
When technology is moving fast, what is the synthesis step between exploration and exploitation, why is it so commonly skipped, what are the costs of skipping it, and what strategies allow organisatio…
Adam Smith, Organisational Design, Desire Paths, and AI Strategy
What can Adam Smith's insights into human nature and morality - drawn from *The Theory of Moral Sentiments* (ToMS) and *The Wealth of Nations* (WoN) - teach us about designing organisations that align…
AI inverted the knowledge-work scarcity equation
Before Artificial Intelligence (AI), throughput (volume of output) was the binding constraint on knowledge work. AI has
dramatically reduced the cost of generating output. Does the evidence support th…
Force multiplier, not cost reducer
When Artificial Intelligence (AI) multiplies the productive capacity of each person by 5–10x, organisations face a
strategic choice: reduce headcount to cut costs, or redeploy the same people against…
Superpowers as inspiration
What ideas, patterns, and workflow practices from `davidamitchell/superpowers` (a fork of `obra/superpowers`) can be used as inspiration for improving agent tooling in `davidamitchell/Latest-developme…
Better Business Cases
What is the Better Business Cases (BBC) Five Case Model framework, what are the requirements and standards for each of the five cases, and how should an AI agent apply this framework to author, review…
RUN vs BUILD IT spending allocation in non-IT primary businesses
How do non-IT primary businesses (manufacturing, retail, finance) calculate and apportion IT spending between RUN (nondiscretionary operational sustainment) and BUILD (discretionary strategic enhancem…
Exploit versus explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) investment classification
How should organisations distinguish between exploitation and exploration AI investments in practice, and what diagnostic criteria and portfolio tools enable that distinction to be applied at budget a…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding assistant deployment outcomes
Which organisations have published or disclosed coherent AI strategies specifically targeting software engineering, what outcomes have they measured, and what does the trajectory from AI-assisted codi…
Machine Learning (ML) technique taxonomy and selection criteria for analytics…
What is the complete, structured landscape of machine learning techniques and algorithms that an advanced analytics department should know, use, and actively pursue — covering foundational concepts, w…
Enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) efficiency programme outcomes
Which published AI strategies — corporate, national, or sector-specific — are explicitly designed around business efficiency as the primary objective, what measurable outcomes have they produced, and…
Jevons Paradox: efficiency gains, demand rebound, and the falling cost of…
How does Jevons Paradox operate across different sectors historically, what are the conditions under which cost or efficiency improvements *do not* increase total demand, and what do current thinkers…