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NOTE: I would like a hard reboot on 2026, please! Between multiple deep freezes, the last of which froze some pipes and cracked a joint I found right before it could turn into a basement catastrophe, to a historic blizzard, to various IRL shenanigans I mostly can’t talk about yet — it’s been a rough couple of months. I couldn’t let February end without a single post, though, and I had five good links saved up that are worth sharing, even without the usually excessive commentary from me. You really should click and read all five of them this time.

_ONE

Leaving the Cult: Why It’s Time to Stop Believing in SEO Magic | Kevin MacDonald

All of this means that the argument for a strong, skilled, strategic marketing function is more compelling now than it was when SEO was ascendant. Not less.

There’s been a raging debate about SEO, AEO, and GEO on LinkedIn for a while now (shoutout to Rand Fishkin for regularly calling BS on charlatans in his posts, and often in the comments of their own attention-seeking posts), and if you’ve been around long enough to have experienced the birth of SEO, MacDonald’s overview will have you nodding your head to a familiar beat.

For better and worse, I’ve always treated SEO as a secondary priority throughout my professional career, preferring to focus on ensuring I present a consistent, authentic voice combined with clear value propositions for whatever products or services I had to offer. Working for companies with clearly defined missions and audiences — with products or services that don’t suck — does the heavy lifting SEO gurus love to pretend is dark magic, but when you have a subpar offering, or are blindly chasing scale, gaming the system is an understandably appealing temptation.

__TWO

Intelligence, Subtracted | Dominic Wellington

The point of the exercise is not the production of the six-page document; the drafting and redrafting, thinking hard about what to include, and the deep knowledge which results from that effort — that work is the object of the exercise. Handing the creation of the document over to an LLM is like trying to train for a marathon by taking a taxi.

When I really want to think something through and communicate it clearly to myself and others, I’ve always preferred a narrative approach over slides. (Hello, blogs!) I often end up with the latter anyway because it’s what’s asked for, and so much is often lost as a result. I didn’t realize that approach was considered a thing in certain business circles, so hearing that one of its main practitioners (Amazon) is turning that thoughtful process over to an LLM is just a sign of the times, I guess.

I find it interesting that there’s so much handwringing about teenagers’ declining attention spans and the impact of social media, but LLMs are treated as an overwhelmingly positive tool for important business people making important business decisions to let do their thinking for them.

Make it make sense.

___THREE

AI Is Making You Boring | Sandra Matz, Jonathan Sperling

Generic AIs flatten us across society; personalized AIs flatten us within ourselves. One compresses differences between people, the other constrains exploration within them. In both cases, something vital is lost: the spontaneous, sometimes contradictory variety that fuels creativity and individuality.

This is usually obvious to anyone who even attempts to look beyond the AI hype, but some of y’all still think “AI” makes you more creative, can write good books, replace good readers’ advisory, etc.

Ironically, I think talking too much about AI also makes people boring. I already regret focusing this much on it, again, but the nonsense just won’t stop hitting my radar, so I’m going to keep sharing interesting and informed takes about its many, many downsides until morale improves.

Stay woke!

____FOUR

The Monotony of Homogenization | David Gallaher

When you write something yourself, you discover what you believe. When you struggle through an idea, it becomes yours. When you revise, you sharpen it. If you skip that process, you skip the ownership of your ideas.

Yes, there’s a theme here. Yes, you should read all of them. Yes, you should also read The Cluetrain Manifesto.

_____FIVE

Anthropic Confirms: AI is Making Coders Dumber | Vivienne Ming

Many people don’t want to hear this. They call it pessimism. But here is the inconvenient truth: the opening quote isn’t mine. It is a research finding from Anthropic’s own analysis of how Claude Code impacts developers.

Ming had one of my all-time favorite quotes about reliance on AI a few years ago (“The person you got on Day 1 is the person you have on Day 1,000.”), and now Anthropic themselves are confirming it for one of AI boosters’ favorite use cases.

I also love her Outsourcers, Validators, and Cyborgs framing. So many of y’all think you’re becoming Cyborgs when you’re actually just batteries. #cmonson

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