Posts on Kate Chapman — Untangling Systems

Robot Friends, LLMs and Rug Pulls

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

A quick note on what has changed

On April 4, 2026, Anthropic blocked Claude Pro and Max subscribers from using their plans with third-party agent frameworks, starting with OpenClaw and extending to all third-party harnesses in the coming weeks. If you want to keep using those tools with Claude, you now pay separately through pay-as-you-go API pricing. For heavy agentic use, that can mean costs up to 50 times higher than a flat monthly subscription.

Winton Was First. Ford Was Faster.

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Here’s something I learned recently about my own family: my great-great-grandfather Thomas Henderson and his brother-in-law Alexander Winton co-founded the Winton Motor Carriage Company. They were one of the first to commercially sell automobiles in the United States. By 1913 it was a serious operation. Skilled people, proud craft, excellent cars built by hand. Then Ford’s assembly line arrived and the ground shifted. Winton was first. Ford was faster. (My relatives passed on hiring Ford in 1898. We don’t talk about that.)

Faux Consensus and the Least Bad Decision Trap

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000

We will get back to talking about AI soon. I promise. Those that were waiting for me to take a break from the AI, here we go!

Today, let’s talk about an older and much messier technology: humans trying to make decisions together.

I have been thinking about data governance for a new project I am working on, and it keeps reminding me that, in plain language, governance is the rules and norms a community agrees to play by. Not just what tools we use, but how we decide. Who gets to say yes. How concerns are raised. What happens when we disagree.

ChatGPT and Claude are typing...to each other

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Back in the heyday of AOL I made AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) chatbots. I was part of an entire community that did this. These bots were not intelligent at all, but they had all sorts of themes and we had fun. Creating different types of chatbots has always been an interest of mine, especially having them interact with each other. This is what led me to think about how to get LLMs to talk to each other while retaining their memory about the human behind them.

Thoughts on meeting fatigue, because I have thoughts again

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I was staring at the wall. My mind was blankish. I say blankish because there was still this nagging feeling that I had forgotten something. That there was something left to do.

This was not simply resting, it was more light disassociation. If disassociation could ever be light. My brain had quietly opted out. I was anxious about all the things I should be doing, aware of time passing, but unable to pick anything up. No book. No article. No email. Just… nothing.

Tobler’s Law in Latent Space

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

There’s an idea in geography called Tobler’s First Law of Geography: “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” It sounds almost obvious when you first hear it. Of course nearby things are similar. But recently I’ve been wondering whether AI is quietly breaking this intuition, or revealing that “near” was always more complicated than we thought.

Deeper into Tobler

Tobler was not the first to notice this pattern, but he was the one who popularized it. Earlier work by R. A. Fisher in 1935 described similar ideas in the context of crops, where nearby plants tended to be more alike than those farther apart. Tobler first introduced his formulation publicly in 1969, and it was published in 1970 in A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region.

Why Are You Making the Thing You’re Making?

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000

When I first started mapping in OpenStreetMap, I walked every trail in my neighborhood. I’d walk trails that were already perfectly visible from satellite imagery. I didn’t need to do it, I could hand digitize if I wanted. But I was mapping those trails as a one person protest. You see the neighborhood next door had all the same resources but big “no trespassing” signs for non-residents. I coined the act “spite mapping” and the act of trespassing to collect the data was part of the point. Was it a little petty? Maybe.

A Tangled Cetacean and AI Safety Theater

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Note: This is a heavy topic involving the death of stranded whales.

Over the weekend a young humpback whale was stranded on a beach in Oregon. They were tangled in rope from crabbing equipment. People came from all over the area to help, posting that they had extra wet suits, lights, and other tools, as well as volunteering to be in the cold ocean overnight. A dangerous situation, and yet they were all coming together for this creature. I was riveted by the story, as were many others.

Introducing the Promptatorium

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve been following the work of some folks who are using LLMs more efficiently than I am. One of the key skills seems to be orchestrating a series of agents working together. I’ve had a little success with doing this in while coding, but not to the extent that I have observed others. I was looking for another way to explore more deeply.

I’ve always been interested in simulating biological systems, so instead of trying to figure out how to orchestrate a bunch of agents to write code, I decided to build a biological system to see how the agent orchestration would work.

Using Models Together ChatGPT Atlas and Earth Index

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000

A lot of my experimentation lately is using common AI tools in different ways. I decided to see what would happen if I tried using ChatGPT with geospatial models. And I just did a simple experiment where I was working to create labels in Earth Index and using ChatGPT’s browser Atlas as my partner in that.

I’m sharing with you part one, which is not the more successful part of doing this. ChatGPT has difficulty using the map and it would have been much faster for me to do it by myself. I also tried this workflow 4 different times and with different types of features dairy farms, green houses and mining. The first time I did it was the most successful, but it was also the time I wasn’t recording.

You'll Always Remember Your First System

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Early in my career I always panicked a little when beginning a new role. This time, I was really panicking.

I’d just joined a Ruby on Rails shop after spending years in the .NET world. The organization I was coming from ran an entire Microsoft stack down to the version control. My new role? A different programming language, a different database, different source control, it was all different!

I shared an office with the most senior developer there and every time I asked him a question his response was:

An Untangled System: Capture in Real Time, Refine with AI

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Move faster without losing context: capture in real time, then refine with AI.

At 8:00 AM we kicked off a revenue conversation: should we charge a stakeholder group we don’t currently serve with premium offerings? Sales, customer success, engineering, product, and our CEO joined. The product manager and I owned the follow-up.

I captured the meeting in Granola (AI meeting recorder/notes) and asked it to outline the options we discussed. After the meeting, the PM and I huddled with Granola again. There, we pruned the list to the candidates worth sizing.

An Untangled System: How to Use Low-Stakes Experiments Build Real AI Adoption

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Maybe Just Start with a Roast: How Low-Stakes Experiments Build Real AI Adoption

Yesterday started with me asking ChatGPT: “Give me the laziest way to cook this roast.” Could I have looked at a few recipes? Used my intuition? Cooked to temperature? Sure. But I use low stakes activities like this to see where AI is at as it is evolving quickly.

It suggested low and slow in the oven: specific temperature, timeline, the works. Perfect. I tossed it in and went about my day. Four hours later, the roast wasn’t quite done yet, and I realized I miscalculated my timing. Back to ChatGPT: “I need to leave for 2+ hours but this needs another 1.5 hours of cooking. What do I do?”

An Untangled System: Using AI as a Teacher

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

AI as a Teacher: How to Use AI Tools to Learn About New Systems

I have a set of AI tools I use regularly as part of my daily workflow. In this post, I’ll share how I use them to learn about a system I was unfamiliar with, and how these tools have become part of how I teach myself new things.

I have been thinking a lot about how games can help people learn to use AI. I have been building a game called Promptatorium where you write prompts to create organisms that then go live in worlds with other prompt created organisms.

An Untangled System: Why Quick Fixes Can Poison the System

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Quick Fixes Can Poison the System: Your Inventions in a Complex System are Crucial

I could solve my rat problem in a weekend.

Box of rat poison, hungry rats and by Monday most of the rats would be gone.

Except poison doesn’t stay where you put it in the system.

The rats eat the poison.
The cats eat the poisoned rats.
My dogs eat the poisoned rats.
The hawks and owls eat the poisoned rats.

I’d be trading “rats are eating my feed” for “dead cats, poisoned dogs, and worse rodent problems.”