AI just made every individual 10x more productive.
No company became 10x more valuable as a result.
Where did the productivity go?
This isn’t the first time this has happened.
In the 1890s, electricity promised enormous productivity gains.
Textile mills in New England, built to harness the rotational power of steam engines, quickly installed faster electric motors in their place.
But for thirty years, electrified mills saw almost no increase in output. The technology was far superior. But the organization was not.
It wasn’t until the 1920s, when factories completely redesigned the mills once again, with assembly lines, individual motors within every piece of equipment, and workers and machines executing drastically different jobs, that electrification produced meaningful returns. — Read More
Daily Archives: March 13, 2026
How I Use LLMs for Security Work
I’ve been using LLM tools like Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT extensively in my security & engineering work for the past couple years. Not as a replacement for thinking—but they genuinely help me move faster through complex problems. If you’re a security analyst, SOC analyst, threat hunter or engineer who hasn’t found a rhythm with these tools yet, I’ll try to share what’s been working for me with the hope it helps you too. — Read More
How We Hacked McKinsey’s AI Platform
McKinsey & Company — the world’s most prestigious consulting firm — built an internal AI platform called Lilli for its 43,000+ employees. Lilli is a purpose-built system: chat, document analysis, RAG over decades of proprietary research, AI-powered search across 100,000+ internal documents. Launched in 2023, named after the first professional woman hired by the firm in 1945, adopted by over 70% of McKinsey, processing 500,000+ prompts a month.
So we decided to point our autonomous offensive agent at it. No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream.
Within 2 hours, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production database. — Read More
The most important question nobody’s asking about AI
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that the Department of War has declared Anthropic a supply chain risk, because Anthropic refused to remove redlines around the use of their models for mass surveillance and for autonomous weapons.
Honestly I think this situation is a warning shot. Right now, LLMs are probably not being used in mission critical ways. But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs. This includes the soldiers (by which I mean the robot armies), the superhumanly intelligent advisors and engineers, the police, you name it.
Our future civilization will run on AI labor. And as much as the government’s actions here piss me off, in a way I’m glad this episode happened – because it gives us the opportunity to think through some extremely important questions about who this future workforce will be accountable and aligned to, and who gets to determine that. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 