… people using AI are producing more stuff faster without any clear sense of whether the stuff is good or consistent …
… single person with the right tools can do what used to require a department.
… AI can execute tasks that once demanded teams of specialists.
… economics that made large firms necessary are reversing.
… solopreneur’s …
… advantage is coherence.
… coherence … : the degree to which every part of an operation derives from the same understanding, the same model of reality and set of priorities and tradeoffs.
… entire loop happens inside one mind.
Every handoff loses information, every translation introduces drift, and every layer of abstraction moves further from ground truth.
Organizations have spent decades trying to solve this problem.
… fighting against something that won’t budge:
knowledge is sticky and context is lossy,
and understanding doesn’t transfer perfectly between humans.
… company starts small, with the founders doing everything themselves.
… decisions quickly because they understand everything about the business, and the business works.
… hire people … transfer processes. … new employees don’t have the context that generated those processes …
… adding coordination mechanisms like project managers, alignment meetings, and cross-functional reviews.
… 2022 Microsoft study found … spend over 50% of their time on internal communication and coordination.
context fragmentation
… information isn’t understanding …
Understanding = integration
… integration happens in minds
Each person reads a fragment, interprets it through their own context, and forms their own understanding.
People don’t disagree on facts; they’re operating from different maps of the same territory.
… each employee has their own AI assistant, trained on whatever context they happen to feed it …
AI amplifies individual perspectives rather than creating shared ones.
… operating alone, you have one context, one understanding, one model ..
^^… humans are good at integration and judgment …^^
^^… using AI to do random shit faster, you’re not capturing the advantage.^^
coherence stack
… mind layer, which is you: your understanding, your judgment, your integrated model … layer can’t be automated or delegated, and it’s the source of coherence.
context layer … documents that AI tools can consume. … your constraints and tradeoffs, your voice guidelines, your decision history.
execution layer, where AI operates.
output layer …nothing reaches this layer without passing through a coherence check:
does this output reflect my model? Would I have produced something like this? Does it fit with everything else?
Most people using AI skip the context layer entirely.
context layer
What problem do I solve, and for whom specifically?
What’s my actual thesis for why my approach works
What are the core tradeoffs I’ve chosen?
… maintain a decision log. When you make a significant choice, write down what you decided and why.
What do I explicitly not do?
… build your constraints file.
For example:
… When choosing between comprehensive and focused, choose focused. …
How do I sound?
Include examples. Point to a piece you wrote that exemplifies the voice, and one that doesn’t.
… short enough to include in AI prompts. … compression without loss of generative power.
Every output that ships should pass through a coherence check.
You can automate part of this.
Feed your AI tool your recent outputs and ask it to compare a new draft against them, flagging inconsistencies.
… final judgment has to be yours.
anti-patterns that break coherence
Context starvation … ask AI to do something without feeding it your operating model, your constraints, your voice.
AI outputs without proper review … deviations accumulate.
Model staleness … understanding evolves but your context documents don’t.
Fragmented tooling = using different AI tools with different contexts.
Decision amnesia = making choices without recording the reasoning.
… audit your operation for coherence as often as possible. … frequency matters less than doing it at all.
… audit also reveals context layer gaps.
Add constraints, add examples, make the implicit explicit.
… coherence advantage works best in domains where the value comes from understanding rather than from physical or regulatory scale.
… large organizations haven’t figured out how to respond. … give everyone AI tools and hope for productivity gains, which accelerates their fragmentation …
… transaction costs are collapsing …
Coasean logic that justified large firms is weakening.
Example: A factory pollutes a fisherman’s river. Whether the factory has the right to pollute, or the fisherman has the right to clean water, they will negotiate to the same efficient outcome — the one that maximizes total value. The initial assignment of rights only affects distribution (who pays whom), not efficiency.
If there is a new moat (and I’ll admit, that’s a big “if”) it probably looks like coherence; the ability to operate as one mind, one understanding, one model, …