Category: Tech

Folks are talking more to their chatbot than to colleagues.

We’re deploying AI agents into remote work environments that regulators are actively tightening, e.g.
* Italy just extended criminal health and safety obligations from companies to employees working from home;
* In the US, surveys are calling 2026 the year of “Great Compliance” with monitoring tools expanding.

In an org, someone will have to think about how employees still interact with each other and handle their new AI collaborators without stressing out.

I bet soon we’ll be talking about Employee Experience Design.

Now you have agents that can write entire codebases while you sip coffee. So, AI coding tools are pushing far more changes into delivery pipelines, that were never modernized, creating a velocity paradox where teams move faster but take on more deployment risk, manual rework, and QA burnout. Everything after the code is now the bottleneck, that is the gap that harness engineering is now trying to close.

Harness engineering has become one of the trends in AI lately, taking over context eng and prompt eng before it. Essentially being the discipline of designing systems around agents rather than obsessing over prompts. Meaning: designing the constraints, feedback loops, tests, and tooling that sit around AI agents so they can safely write and maintain large systems.

Testimonials describe teams shipping applications with over one million lines of production code generated by agents, while humans focus on the harness and guardrails rather than the individual functions. Aggressive teams are already seeing order of magnitude productivity gains compared to late 2025 workflows, mainly when they invest in robust harnesses for intent capture, specs, context, and automated feedback.

There are two possible futures for small teams: one where AI just sprays more code and business rules into an already fragile stack; and another where you design a harness that makes life easier for your fellow humans 🙂 I am less interested in a future where AI writes all the code, and more in one where small teams can offer big company reliability without big company bureaucracy.

This will be a recurring topic over the next years. Folks on either side – “this chat looks like consciousness to me” – “sir, that is just the smartest printer ever made” …It will be discussed forever. I don’t claim to have the “right” answer, but as usual a practical stance.

As I see it, even the most basic computing function has consciousness. You cannot compute without an input and an output. An input is already, say, 1 cent of consciousness. After an output, you might have 10 cents. (The growth isn’t linear because having an output is worth more than double having an input – an output brings additional gains in knowledge of how a system produces an output.)

This kind of system consciousness is not permanent though. The system has to be fed its own output and new inputs for consciousness to gain more… frequency. Take this notion to infinity and you have permanent consciousness. Add sensors and world models to the inputs, and the system can have a significant understanding of the real world (beyond what it has learned in training).

Consciousness doesn’t have to be a complex metaphysical thing. As other things, it can be an emergent quality. In this case, emerging out of a constant stream of inputs and outputs. I don’t think human consciousness strays far from this. Nature itself favors simplicity and reproducibility.

So if you’re asking yourself: am I talking to a conscious thing? Well, for that fleeting moment when you’re providing inputs and your favorite AI system is processing it, yes. Your chatbot may not be permanently conscious. But anyone out there plugging an LLM to robotic sensors, permanently active, may already be emulating human-like consciousness. At least for as long as its context window doesn’t run out of memory space.

In the light of recent news about N$A practices, you may wonder how to take a little more control of your Web presence and experience. Here are some steps to consider if you value privacy…

Email:

• Make sure the connection to your email provider/server is a secure connection. Webmail providers (those where you check your email in your browser) usually are. Others (server-based) should be double-checked to be using SSL/TLS connection.
• If you’re in Europe, consider using an European provider, such as ProtonMail.
• For an additional security layer, if you’re not using ProtonMail, consider encrypting your messages. Thunderbird users can use the Enigmail add-on. For Webmail, there are some browser extensions for encryption. Click here for more guidance on this.

Encrypted Searches:

• Use encrypted.google.com as your default search engine, thus preventing eavesdropping from random people when browsing in unsecure connections. Better yet, try DuckDuckGo — a search engine that doesn’t focus on personalized results.
• Note: this won’t prevent your Internet Service Provider (a.k.a. ISP / your Internet access company) from knowing the sites you visit and the terms of your searches. Google might also keep track unless you turn off their web history. For this, you’d need to setup custom DNS servers (in your browser or internet connection settings) or use a VPN.

Proxies/VPN [advanced]:

• Prevent your ISP from knowing the websites you visit by doing your web browsing via proxy server / VPN.
• You’ll need to try some example services to figure what works best for you, e.g. torproject.org or AirVPN
• Update: here’s an even better list.
• Update: Google just released a guide for checking your WiFi network security.

Enable HTTPS browsing:

• HTTPS Everywhere
• Enable HTTPS / secure browsing in Facebook’s privacy settings. Double-check your other settings there, in case Facebook sneaked in another “feature” with dubious purposes. Better yet, avoid facebook altogether.

Blocking ad trackers, social plugins (and any scripts):

• The absolute best privacy extension is uBlock Origin, period.
• With this ad blockler active, you don’t even need to worry about browser cookies much, as the advertising cookies used to track you won’t get set on your browser.
• If you don’t use an adblocker, however… see next.

Hold your cookies:

• Control the “cookies” stored by webpages (and their ads) on your computer. For example, you can configure your browser to keep cookies only until you close the browser. I suggest doing a complete cleanup of all cookies once before you configure this. Be ready to remember the passwords you have used in the past, because…
• You will need to login again to any site requiring login on your next browsing session. You can counter this by letting your browser save passwords. Personally I prefer that to having all that cookie data on my computer, as I trust browser developers more than advertisers.
• The privacy options of web browsers usually provide a Do Not Track setting, which in theory it can help prevent advertisement tracking. Google Chrome also provides prediction and spell checking services which you might not really need.

Personal mentions and profiles:

• If you’re being mentioned on the web and would like to disappear, SafeShepherd can help with that.

Online Storage:

• Avoid storing all your personal files in the cloud, at least with companies from countries with snoopy governments.
• For what you must, try Proton Drive.

Chat:

• Whatsapp is owned by facebook; Telegram doesn’t encrypt chats by default. Use Signal.

First published June 26th, 2013. Last update: Sep 2, 2021.