Staying at the Front of the Pack

[joshua-temple]

The Proposal

Treat currency with AI tooling as an engineering practice with an owner, a cadence, and a review trigger, not something we each keep up with in our spare time.

Why This Matters

The half-life of an AI tooling decision is months, not years. The best choice we make this quarter will be superseded by spring, and nothing announces the obsolescence:

• When a new model ships, nobody tells you which of your prompts and skills just became dead weight.
• Scaffolding decays invisibly. A retry wrapper or chunking strategy may be compensating for a limitation that no longer exists: pure overhead now, possibly making results worse.
• The gap is silent until it's embarrassing. A team starting fresh today would build a leaner stack than one that hasn't re-evaluated in a year.

We already solved this exact problem for dependencies: automated update checks, CI that proves an upgrade is safe, a named owner of the pipeline. Our AI stack has no equivalent.

What an Equivalent Could Look Like

• An inventory. Every prompt, skill, and workaround we run, annotated with the model assumption it was tuned against.
• A trigger. On each major model release, sweep the inventory: does this still earn its keep on the new model?
• A kill test. The default question for any skill is "does it still beat a plain prompt?", and deletion is a win, not a loss.

Open Questions

1. Ownership. Who is the named person accountable for flagging when a model release invalidates one of our skills? Volunteer or rotation?
2. Trigger. Calendar cadence (quarterly review) or event-driven (major model release)? Pick one and pilot it for a quarter.
3. Inventory cost. Could we list our prompts/skills with their model assumptions in a single afternoon? If not, that gap is itself the first work item.
4. Measurement. What's the cheapest honest way to test "skill vs. plain prompt" on a new model: a fixed eval set, a spot check, or a timeboxed side-by-side?

[joshua-temple]

Accepted, merged with #4 as Deliberate Currency. Documented in #13.