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Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

· ruby-on-rails · 1 min read

Nested resources in Ruby on Rails: Why bother?

Discover the pros and cons of using nested resources in Ruby on Rails and learn when they truly add value to your application development.

Duration: 0:19 | Size: 0.4 MB

Nested resources in Ruby on Rails are sort of neat, but they are a pain to implement. What’s more, I have to ask myself, why bother?

If a resource has a unique identifier id, then why would you need to call its parent resource to call it? The unique identifier is enough. And what resource doesn’t have a unique id these days?

The agent-shaped org chart

Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.

AI as staff, not software

Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.

Knowledge work was never work

Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

How do I get my dev team to adopt AI?

A stub on helping mixed-interest development teams find their own useful ways into AI.

Want to learn about agents? Talk to someone who ran an agency.

I spent 20 years running consulting engagements at Fortune 500 companies. Turns out that's the best preparation for running a fleet of AI agents ... because the problems are identical.

Your AI agents need a water cooler

We run a twelve-session AI fleet that coordinates through an IRC breakroom. A friend asked: why are you making AI agents act like humans? The answer turned out to be more interesting than the question.

Rails + sugarcrm - an alternative approach

Discover a faster, simpler way to connect Rails with SugarCRM by accessing the database directly, avoiding slow API calls for seamless synchronization.

Rails + sugarcrm + soap - get a list of sugar accounts into Rails as an array

Integrate SugarCRM with Rails using SOAP to effortlessly sync company names and streamline your project management workflow.

Rails: Parsing ical calendar on a password-protected webdav server

Learn how to parse iCal calendars from a password-protected WebDAV server using Ruby on Rails and the iCalendar plugin for seamless integration.