The Jagged Frontier
Index
The full survey

Chapters

One question, asked five times across different terrain: where does the AI factory reach, and where does it hit a wall? Each chapter stands alone, but the threads run straight through.

01

The Jagged Frontier

Why intelligence is a profile, not a number — and where it meets walls that no amount of scale can move

The coastline, not the wall
02

The Content Factory

What happens to culture when the verifier is engagement and the artifact is disposable

Strip-miner, not prospector
03

The Machine That Must Behave

A game is not an artifact but a system — and that changes which parts of it the factory can reach

Surface is cheap; invariants are not
04

The Specification Is the Work

From the todo app to the flight controller: a gradient of essential complexity, and where the factory's reach ends

Building got cheap; deciding did not
05

The Verifier and Nature

In science the judge is either formal proof or reality itself — and its price predicts where AI transforms and where it stalls

The price of the verifier