Elliot Little
Get in touch
Writing

The bit between the strategy deck and the pull request.

I write about shipping AI to people the model can hurt if it's wrong, and about leading the team while doing the building. Newest first inside each section, from Medium.

“Perfect if you're currently navigating the messy, magical reality of AI implementation”
AI Summit London
“This is a sensational write-up”
Australian Institute for Machine Learning
“Such a sharp, clear-eyed analysis of the challenges we're all grappling with.”
Medium subscriber
“One of the few AI articles that I felt was worth reading in recent times.”
Uplevyl
Podcast · Just Now Possible

Building a Career Co-pilot for Disadvantaged Students: How Zero Gravity Bridges Knowing and Doing

With Teresa Torres, on building AI that closes the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it, for students without the network that usually supplies the answer.

Listen

wrong answers cost

Shipping AI to people who can't afford it to be wrong

Tutors, probate, safeguarding. What changes when a hallucination has a cost the user pays.

2025-07-20

The Trust Gap: Why Your AI Product Will Fail Without This

Capability is not adoption. What has to be true before someone lets a model act on their behalf.

Read it
2025-07-14

What I Learned Shipping AI to Users Who Can’t Afford Bad Advice

Deploying to first-generation university applicants, people lost in visa paperwork, job seekers in a brutal market. What changes when a hallucination closes a door permanently, read against the EU AI Code of Practice and a run of real failures.

Read it
2025-06-17

Amsterdam Built the ‘Perfect’ Ethical AI System. It Still Failed. Here’s Why.

A city did everything the responsible-AI playbook asks for and the system still failed. Where governance-by-checklist breaks.

Read it

leading while building

Product leadership while building

Choosing the problem, staying with the code, and the job that appears when the handoff disappears.

2026-07-31

The Product Engineer and the End of the Handoff

When building gets cheap, the handoff becomes the expensive part. On the job that appears when one person carries a problem from prototype to production, and why a rubric has to be uncovered from real failures instead of written up front.

Read it
2025-06-16

What I Learned Spending A Week With 100+ AI Leaders

Field notes from a week with the people actually deploying this, and the gap between the conference talk and the rollout.

Read it

working with agents

Loops, stopping rules, and writing the fixes down so a correction outlives the session.

2026-07-13

The Loop Was Never the Hard Part

The agent loop is the easy part; knowing when to stop it is the work. The thinking underneath the agent rules on this site's /evals page.

Read it
2026-01-28

Claude Keeps Making the Same Mistakes. So I Started Writing Down the Fixes.

Models have infinite knowledge and no habits. On writing the fixes down so a correction survives the session.

Read it

earlier

Pieces from before the AI work took over the writing.

2025-05-23

Learning Anxiety in the Age of Artificial Everything

On the creeping pressure to keep pace when every device seems to learn faster than we do, and why not learning can suddenly feel existential.

Read it
2025-04-22

The Walled Garden: How Zuckerberg Tried To Build His Own Internet

How Facebook's attempt to connect the next billion people became a lesson in who gets to shape the internet, and who gets left outside it.

Read it

off the clock

Writing came first, and I still do it for the fun of it.

  • Newcastle360

    Newcastle United features, 2016 to 2018: player profiles, a 125th-anniversary quiz, and how Willie McFaul got from Ulster to Guam.

  • Horror

    Short stories and screenplays, which is what I write when it's just for me.