8am AI
A weekly peer conversation on what's actually changing in AI work — recorded, mined, and assembled into a public corpus. The book isn't authored upfront; it accretes from what gets said, one Wednesday at a time. 109 meetings and counting since April 2024.
8am-ai
David Olsson25 Jun 2026#8am-ai#corpus#agentic-ai#retrospective
Two years of 8am AI: what a weekly conversation actually recorded
109 meetings, 14 themes, 759 ideas — mined from the transcripts of a weekly peer conversation. The first look at the whole corpus, end to end, from "8am AI School" in 2024 to the standing group of 2026.
25 Jun 2026
From scrubs to swarms: the two-year arc of agentic work at 8am AI
The single thread that runs cleanest through two years of 8am AI: agents. From hand-authored "scrubs" in 2024, through MCP orchestration in 2025, to autonomous swarms in 2026 — grounded quarter by quarter in the meetings it came from.
25 Jun 2026
The model is the commodity: two years of context engineering at 8am AI
The corpus's clearest conviction, restated for two years: the model is the commodity, the context is the lever. From "scrubs" in 2024 to corpus-building and "how do you know" in 2026.
25 Jun 2026
Teaching in the rubble: the education thread at 8am AI
The group's conscience: if the tools can do the work, what is school for? From 2024's optimistic AI-assisted learning to 2026's hard question about foundational knowledge and the students who can't yet evaluate what AI gives them.
25 Jun 2026
The tool-churn log: two years of developer productivity at 8am AI
A working-developer's diary of 2024–2026: GPT-4 → Claude-in-Canada → N8N → slop code → multi-agent. The tools churned every quarter; the bottleneck kept moving up the stack. AI made the code cheap and the coordination expensive.
25 Jun 2026
Mining the glue: the signal-harvesting thread at 8am AI
The thread that became the method. Reading across everything said to surface the connective tissue no single human can track — from 2024's monetization framing to the project-state four-layer model that mines this very corpus.
25 Jun 2026
Atomic to architecture: the system-thinking thread at 8am AI
The promotion nobody assigned: the tools pushed everyone from doing atomic tasks to designing systems. The spine the whole corpus hangs on — and the uncomfortable corollary for anyone who only ever did the unit.