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Season 7—Spring 2026  ·  12 episodes  ·  Through-line: the human architecture of institutional change
Boring AI
is Good AI
Gordon
Why AI Scaffolding
Matters More than Use Cases
Flowers · S6
Decentralized
AI is the Future
Goertzel
Canonical
Knowledge is Key
DosSantos
What AI as
Cheap Prediction Means
Gans
Cheap Prediction,
Expensive Change
Goldfarb
Folk Law &
Fax Machines
Pahlka
Inside The
Infinity Machine
Mallaby
Crisis Is
Your Opening
Nitze
The Confabulation
Machine
Ratliff
No Strategy
Without Vision
Evergreen
When Agents Have
Wallets, Trust Is Currency
Cohen Freue
Nuclear Fusion,
No Power Lines
Frankle
The Checklist Your
Deck Is Missing
McMillan ← Latest
New Ideation
New this week  ·  S7E12 · Jeff McMillan
Ideation

The Checklist Your Deck Is Missing

Most enterprises are under intense board pressure to deploy AI agents. Jeff McMillan returns to address the widening gap between agent hype and operational readiness—you can brute-force a handful of agents, but scaling to fifteen thousand demands near-perfect data accessibility, semantic structure, controls, and custom evals.

Originating episode · The Checklist Your Deck Is Missing · Invisible Machines  ·  Jeff McMillan  ·  S7E12  ·  June 2026
Read the full Ideation →

If your organization is pursuing agentic AI without a foundation in place, this conversation is the checklist your deck is probably missing.

—Josh Tyson on McMillan’s agent-scale checklist · Invisible Machines · S7E12
Related ideas: Knowledge before agents Custom evals Canonical data Agent accountability Foundation stack
In this ideation
Episode
Free
The Checklist Your Deck Is Missing—Jeff McMillan · Invisible Machines
Jeff McMillan  ·  Founder, McMillanAI
The Checklist Your Deck Is Missing · Invisible Machines
S7E12  ·  June 2026
UXM Article
Free  ·  11 min
UX Magazine Staff
Knowledge Before Agents
Companion essay on canonical data, custom evals, process mapping, governance, and why supervising humans are the feature—not the bug.
Read article →
Arc essay
Free  ·  6 min
UX Magazine Staff
Three Conversations with Jeff McMillan
From pre-ChatGPT partnership to curated RAG operations to the agent-scale checklist—one through-line across McMillan’s three Invisible Machines visits.
Read arc essay →

New Articles

All articles →
Service design

The Agile Trap Designers Fall into: Feeding the Beast

Päivi Salminen on why agile teams trap designers in endless mockups—and how design systems front-load decisions so teams can focus on how interfaces actually work.

Päivi Salminen  ·  4 min
 Gamification Series
Part 6 · Conclusion

Design for Players, Not Metrics

Montgomery Singman closes the series: people play because games are worth playing—not because they award points—and success is enrichment, not retention.

Montgomery Singman  ·  Series
Systems & operational design

Job Search Terminal: A Local-First Tool for an AI-Shaped Job Market

Pavel Bukengolts on a free, local-first dashboard that uses AI to augment your judgment while your data and decisions stay on your machine.

Pavel Bukengolts  ·  5 min
Organizational design

The New Makers

James Lang on researchers shipping apps and exhibits—and why the shift from advisor to maker is less about tools than unlearning who you’re allowed to be.

James Lang  ·  20 min
 Gamification Series
Part 5 · Implementation

Implementation

Montgomery Singman on choosing a genre instead of copying mechanics—and building core loops that stay engaging even without badges.

Montgomery Singman  ·  Series
Interaction design

Making the Invisible, Visible: 6 Months of Diving Deeper into AI

Anina Botha on trust, automation bias, and turning invisible human behavior into deliberate product design—not copy-pasted AI features.

Anina Botha  ·  4 min
Systems & operational design

The Spiral Climbs: Ideas Are Expensive, Systems Are Cheap

Pavel Bukengolts on connected stacks, the 48-hour operating loop, and why patterns got cheap while judgment did not.

Pavel Bukengolts  ·  6 min
Systems & operational design

AI Fails Silently: A Systems Perspective on AI Reliability

Kwansah Madani on why AI degrades while dashboards stay green—and what continuous behavioral feedback actually requires.

Kwansah Madani  ·  5 min
Ideations—Season 7 All ideations →
Future-Solving
Naming the human-feeling outcome before the tool parade begins: map what must become true, let exploration stay fuzzy while the vision stays sharp, and refuse to substitute vendor matrices for strategy.
↳ Evergreen, S7E9
Also in: vendor bake-off essays, members kickflip arc
◉ Episode ◉ UXM article ◉ Members essay ◉ Transcript
Canonical Knowledge
One governed layer of meaning everyone agrees to treat as source-of-truth—so agents and humans aren’t improvising incompatible copies of the same policy, pricing rule, or clinical pathway.
↳ DosSantos, S7E2
Also in: scaffolding episodes on operational truth
◉ Episode ◉ Guest article ◉ Transcript ○ Members essay
Cheap Prediction, Expensive Judgment
When prediction drops toward zero marginal cost, the binding constraint stops being “can the model guess right?” and becomes “who is accountable for acting on it inside messy institutions?”
↳ Goldfarb & Gans, S7E3–4
Also in: complements to prediction economics
◉ Episode ◉ UXM article ◉ Transcript ○ Members essay
The Confabulation Machine
LLMs as conviction engines: fluent, plausible, and prone to completing narratives that never happened—a design problem for verification layers, not just model knobs.
↳ Ratliff, S7
Also in: Shell Game cluster essays
◉ Episode ◉ UXM essays ◉ Members essay ◉ Transcript
Latest Episode Episode page →
Watch now  ·  Invisible Machines S7E12
The Checklist Your Deck Is Missing—Jeff McMillan · Invisible Machines S7E12
The Checklist Your Deck Is Missing
Jeff McMillan on the checklist your deck is probably missing
Jeff McMillan  ·  Founder, McMillanAI
Knowledge before agents—canonical data, custom evals, process mapping, and accountability when fifteen thousand bots replace tribal institutional memory.
Recent Episodes
S7 · Jonathan Frankle
Nuclear Fusion, No Power Lines
Fusion-grade models without the grid—and specification beyond benchmarks.
S7 · Brian Evergreen
No Strategy Without Vision
Vision-first strategy and procurement theater.
S7 · Federico Cohen Freue
When Agents Have Wallets, Trust Is Currency
Knowledge before action at enterprise scale.
S7 · Evan Ratliff
The Confabulation Machine
Truth, narrative completion, and verification design.
S7 · Marina Nitze
Crisis Is Your Opening
Sensemaking failure and crisis engineering practice.
S7 · Sebastian Mallaby
Inside The Infinity Machine
Capital, concentration, and frontier models.
S7 · Jennifer Pahlka
Friction Is the Feature
Folk law, implementation gaps, and civic systems.
S7 · Avi Goldfarb
Cheap Prediction, Expensive Change
Complements, judgment, and organizational cost stacks.
S7 · Joshua Gans
What AI as Cheap Prediction Means
Enterprise workflows when inference gets cheap.
Members Essays Member essays →
Members only  ·  Josh Tyson
The “Do a Kickflip” Era of Agentic AI

In the rush to adopt AI agents, many organizations are acting like beginners attempting a kickflip—eager, ambitious, but unprepared. Strategy, runtimes, and verified knowledge turn repetition into progress; hype alone turns it into pavement.

Republication  ·  Paired with Brian Evergreen S7E9
Vision-first strategy Agent runtimes Knowledge bases Future-solving
Josh Tyson  ·  7 min read  ·  Cluster republication 2026
Read members essay →
Also in members
Invisible Machines Social contract
Did We Agree to This?
🔒 Members essay · Josh Tyson · May 6, 2026 · 9 min