Kevin Liao's essay Agents Don't Need Memory. They Need Documentation. argues that memory plugins for coding agents are just retrieval: snippets cut from old transcripts, picked by similarity and pushed into every prompt. His alternative, operator-memory, is a set of Markdown documents the agent reads before a task and updates after it. I agree with most of his diagnosis. It describes a memory system I work on. What his answer leaves out is a way to know whether a document is still true.

"Forward Deployed Engineer" is on every job board, and the question of whether to hire them has reached the most senior levels of large organizations. Ask three companies what the role is and you will get three answers. For an executive, the definition matters less than a plainer question. What are you actually buying?

When Deciding Gets Cheap argued that cheap AI decisions spread into the situations where their confidence means least. Nobody disagrees with that. Every engineer I have said it to nods, means it, and goes back to a system that trusts model output anyway. The gap is not conviction. It is arithmetic.