Synthetic Auth

This essay was first published on O'Reilly Radar on October 26, 2026. I'm fairly proud of that one. Anyone in tech has come across at least one O'Reilly book, and most likely several. An article isn't a book, but getting published there is still a personal and professional accomplishment. Spend a week with almost any infrastructure team in 2026 and you’ll see one AI subscription producing five very different results. One engineer opens 40 pull requests before lunch across repositories they...

A bottle of bourbon, a fifty dollar bill, a driver's license, a label. Part 01 put those three credentials on a counter and found that a century of payment technology rebuilt the money completely and left the other two exactly where they were. Part 02 took the room away, and watched all three get rebuilt at once, unevenly, according to who was on the hook when each one failed. Now take the person away. You are not shopping. You have told something else to shop for you, and it is transacting...

A bottle of bourbon on a counter, a fifty dollar bill, a driver's license, a label. Three credentials, each issued by a different authority, each holding up because somebody could be made to answer if it failed. That was Part 01 , and the striking thing was how little moved: two generations of payment technology arrived, rebuilt money from the ground up, and left the other two credentials exactly as they were. Now take the room away. You are at home. The store is a website. The bottle is in a...

You walk into a store, take a bottle of bourbon off the shelf, and put it on the counter with a fifty dollar bill. The clerk looks at the bill. He looks at you, decides he is not sure, and asks for ID. You hand over your driver's license. He looks at the license, looks at your face, gives you your change, and forgets you before you reach the door. Forty seconds. Neither of you thinks about it again. That transaction is the most sophisticated piece of trust infrastructure you will touch today....

AI Made Delegation Easy Structure Is Still the Skill AI didn't make you faster. It made you stop having to slow down, and that is the more dangerous gift. For most of working history, planning was involuntary. Doing anything, hiring a contractor, drafting a proposal, building a model, took long enough that you had time to think before you were far enough in to regret it. The friction wasn't a design choice. It was just what the world cost. Slowness enforced discipline nobody had to choose on...

Greetings! This week, one auth vendor capped what an AI agent can do below its own user's authority, another focused instead on who even gets to grant an agent access in the first place, and a post on an identity standards group's blog argued that capping delegation this tightly is the wrong instinct to begin with. It also turns out nobody has actually counted what today's agents can already access, and underneath all of it sits the same quiet shift: a growing share of everything being...

The Threshold Agent Nation is a series on machine identity, the accountability gap, and what we are giving up. Part 1 traced how machine identities accumulated, unwatched, across forty years of building. Part 2 showed what that forgotten population cost, through a breach that ran entirely on credentials like the narrator's own, and asked who answers when something goes wrong through an account no one owns. Both were narrated by one of those accounts: svc_backup_prod, a backup process created...

Credentialed but not Accountable Agent Nation is a series on machine identity, the accountability gap, and what we are giving up. Part 1 traced how non-human identities, the service accounts and API keys and machine credentials that quietly run every system, accumulated across forty years of building, installed fast and governed loosely until no one could account for them. It was narrated by one of them: svc_backup_prod, a backup account created in 1998 and forgotten since. This is Part 2. I...

AI: The Falsity of Comparison In the Vajrayana tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, Tukdam is a meditative state said to continue after clinical death. The practitioner, despite having died, appears to remain in deep meditation, the body retaining a lifelike appearance with minimal decomposition for days or even weeks. Researchers are only beginning to study it. The questions it raises remain wide open. We have been trying to understand what a human being is for a very long time. And we're still...

The Skunkworks I do not know what time it is. I know when I am told to run. Every night, at midnight exactly, something wakes me. Not a person. A program called cron, named after chronos, the Greek word for time, checks a table of scheduled instructions once every minute and starts whatever it finds listed for that moment. At midnight, it finds me. I run. I finish. I stop. Cron does not tell me why midnight. Cron does not tell me anything. It reads the table. It does what the table says. I am...