David Boyle's weekly email
David's Saturday AI Thoughts
What happened this week in language models, why it matters, and what it means for how we work. Emailed every Saturday from david@steadman.ai.
Latest essay
Edition #25 · 8th August 2026
My newest colleague
At half past six on New Year’s morning, a colleague messaged me: the overnight job that sorts my photos had jammed halfway through a batch. By the time I’d sat down at my desk in Connecticut it had worked out why, fixed it, and written a rule in its notes so the same jam couldn’t happen twice. The colleague was an AI. That was the morning, more or less, that I stopped visiting one and...
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The weekly emails in full, newest first. Each one opens at the top of that week's email in the archive.
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Essays
25 essays
The weekly centrepiece. What happened, why it matters, and what it means for how organisations absorb AI.
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News worth knowing
294 items
The three things each week, plus the bits that didn't fit. Research, data, stories, and observations from the edges.
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Try this
74 tips with prompts
Practical things you can do this week. Each has a copy-and-paste prompt. Filter by category, search by keyword.
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What readers said
23 editions of letters
Reader reactions, pushback, and the best things people shared. Plus what the LinkedIn community is posting.
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Audio edition
25 episodes
The spoken-word version. Different AI voices for each section. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and RSS.
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Artifacts created for the email
New · 4th August 2026
The Four Freedoms
Four questions that tell you what any AI agent is actually free to do: Reach, Tools, Memory and Guardrails, comparing Cowork and Claude Code side by side.
New · 25th July 2026
The Environmental Cost of AI
What a prompt, a task and a day of AI actually cost in energy, carbon and water, and the subtraction that decides whether the work was worth it. Every number sourced.
New · 23rd July 2026
Getting Executive Teams Hands-On with AI
A planning guide for AI sessions at retreats and leadership conferences: six goals, what works, what doesn't, and six formats, from three and a half years of running them.
Browse all 17 artifacts →
Every tool, framework, research piece and guide built for the email, grouped by what it is for.