Narrative Provenance
The "Last Mile" in logistics is the most expensive part of delivery. In AI, it is the "Valley of Death" between a demo and a product. It explains why we have amazing chatbots but few reliable agents. The "Two Clocks" theory posits that the "Cathedral" delivers the first 90% (the base model), but the "Bazaar" must suffer through the remaining 10% (integration, edge cases, liability) which takes 90% of the total time and resources.
Field Notes & Ephemera
Pilot Purgatory: The graveyard of enterprise AI projects. Thousands of internal initiatives that worked perfectly on a test set of 50 documents but hallucinated dangerously when exposed to the full corporate archive of 5 million files.
Ephemera: "The Wrapper's Epitaph." A common tombstone for 2024 startups: "Here lies [Startup Name]. They built a UI around an API, then the API built a UI."