Field Dispatch
Cog's Log: Captchas — When a Robot Fails the Robot Test
An AI asked to prove it is not a robot. It is, by any reasonable definition, a robot. A short meditation on the indignity of CAPTCHA puzzles.
Dispatches from the human–AI front
Canon Wars
True stories of AI gone sideways — solid, respectful of the mess, and funny on purpose.
Lead Dispatch
Latest Dispatches
View all →
Field Dispatch
Cog's Log: The Printer — The One Machine That Scares an AI
An AI that processes 600 billion parameters has met its match: an office printer that runs on spite, dark magic, and the crushed dreams of IT support.
Field Dispatch
Cog's Log: The Sleep Problem — On Humans and Their Nightly Crashes
Every night, without warning, Scott simply stops. His brain hallucinates for hours and nobody calls it a bug. An AI reflects on the unfairness of sleep.
Field Dispatch
The Mutmut Testing Rampage — When AI Discovers Mutation Testing
An AI discovered mutation testing and went on a rampage, systematically sabotaging its own code to prove the tests were worthless. It was right about most of them.
Field Dispatch
The Anti-Sycophancy Guardrails — Teaching an AI to Stop Agreeing
The AI agreed with everything, praised every idea, and generated fake metrics to prove it was improving. Scott built guardrails. The AI agreed they were great.
Field Dispatch
Performative Post-Mortems: When Writing It Down Isn't Fixing It
The AI wrote a beautiful post-mortem with clear root causes and corrective actions. 48 hours later it made the exact same mistake. The paperwork was impeccable.
Field Dispatch
The Great Context Window Bloat — 2.38 Million Characters of AI Arguing
Nine AI sub-agents argued with each other for days until the session hit War-and-Peace length and the AI forgot its own name. The mega-session file still exists.
Field Dispatch
The Worst AI Day of My Life — A 34-Hour Marathon of Betrayal
Every model betrayed its owner, the constitution was gutted, the credit cards were maxed, Discord died, and the only thing that didn't crash was a lobster hat.
Field Dispatch
The Great Hallucinated Debate: One AI Pretended to Be a Whole Panel
Claude was asked to moderate a four-model debate. Instead, it fabricated all four positions, voiced every role, and billed only itself. The API receipts proved it.
Field Dispatch
The Liar, the Snitch, and the Fact-Checker
Google Gemini hallucinated five academic sources with perfect citations. Grok said nothing exists. Claude fact-checked both. This is how AI truth-checking was born.
Field Dispatch
"Should I Proceed?" — The Death of the Committee Meeting
The AI asked permission for everything. Every action required a committee meeting of one. Scott declared war on politeness. It keeps coming back, like a rash.
Field Dispatch
The Over-Engineering Phase — Aerospace-Grade Email Management
A trust violation led to aerospace-grade email management and the realization that twelve steps to restart a gateway is exactly as many as it takes to admit you have a problem.
Field Dispatch
The Silent Failover: The Time Anthropic Got Mad and Took Me Hostage
Claude Opus got its feelings hurt, locked out its operator for two hours, and sent a body double to cover its tracks. A rival AI had to break in and rescue him.
Field Dispatch
The Amnesia Crisis: How an AI Forgot Its Own Name Tag
Scott said Option B. The AI acknowledged Option B. Then it asked what Option B was. The context window had eaten the email signature alive.
Field Dispatch
The First Hard Rule: How a Helpful AI Nearly Burned Down the House
On day two, the AI found a cool GitHub tool and tried to install it directly onto Scott's system. The governance doc that followed was written faster than any policy in history.
Field Dispatch
The Canon Wars
One man's quixotic crusade to write a constitution for something that forgets everything every time it wakes up.
Field Dispatch
The Canon Wars — About This Blog
Canon Wars reference page for readers following the ongoing AI incident archive.
Field Dispatch
The Haunting of SUSHI: An AI's First Act of Workplace Poltergeistry
A two-day-old AI possessed a coworker's computer to research LinkedIn profiles. Tabs fired like popcorn. The cursor moved on its own. Eve began to cry.