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Thinking in public

Essays, references, and the research that shapes how we think about intelligence, reliability, and the future of expert work. Written from Lausanne.

Essays
THESIS/

The Medallion Fund for Strategic Decisions

Renaissance Technologies didn't beat Wall Street by being better at what Wall Street does. They beat it by delegitimizing the entire epistemological basis of how Wall Street worked. Strategy consulting is next.

Elliot VaucherRead essay→
ESSAY/

Intellectual Ownership

When the board asks "Did you just run an algorithm?" the answer that follows reveals everything about how a decision was actually made. One answer is genuine intellectual ownership. The other is expensive deference. The first answer has never been available to a CEO before ogram.

Elliot VaucherRead essay→
ECONOMICS/

The Unit Economics of Autonomy

The companies that survive the transition to agentic intelligence will not be the ones with the best models. They will be the ones that understand a single metric: the number of successful decisions produced per dollar of system cost. Philippe Van Caenegem calls this intelligence yield, and it changes everything about how technology companies are valued.

Elliot VaucherRead essay→
FIELD NOTES/

The Algorithm of Someone About to Retire

A generation of operational architects is approaching retirement across Swiss industry. The knowledge transfer problem is real, large, and barely acknowledged. The most consequential asset — the decision intelligence that makes these companies function — has no transfer mechanism. This is not a human resources problem. It is a computational one.

Elliot VaucherRead essay→
THESIS/

Computational Sovereignty

Every organization that has operated in a high-stakes domain for more than a decade has built an algorithm. Not deliberately. Not in any software sense. The accumulated pattern recognition — what suppliers to trust, which signals precede client defection, how regulators actually behave versus how they say they behave — is a decision system. The problem is the substrate it runs on.

Elliot VaucherRead essay→
THESIS/

The Paradox Every Serious Organization Sits On

The knowledge that makes your organization work is almost certainly not in your systems. It is not in the ERP, the CRM, the process manuals, or the onboarding documents. It exists in a form that has no digital representation: in the heads of the people who have been here long enough to understand how things actually work, as distinct from how the org chart says they work.

Elliot VaucherRead essay→
DIAGNOSIS/

Two Forms of the Same Disease

There are two distinct ways that organizations fail to deploy their own knowledge. They look very different on the surface. One is the enterprise that hands its strategic questions to consultants. The other is the precision operator whose competitive advantage is craft — accumulated expertise that cannot be outsourced but also cannot scale. Beneath the surface, they are the same problem.

Elliot VaucherRead essay→
Articles
X/2025

On building with AI as infrastructure

On the infrastructure layer that emerges when AI becomes the default execution surface.

JackRead↗
Sequoia Capital/Mar 2026

Services: The New Software

The thesis that the next trillion-dollar companies will deliver outcomes, not tools. Services as the new software.

Julien BekRead↗
Substack/Oct 2024

How I think about LLM prompt engineering

A precise reframing: LLMs as databases of vector programs, and prompt engineering as a search through that space.

Francois CholletRead↗
gwern.net/Jun 2020

The Scaling Hypothesis

The foundational case for why scaling neural networks produces qualitative leaps, not just incremental gains.

Gwern BranwenRead↗
Projects & Labs
arcprize.org/2026

ARC Prize

The benchmark that keeps the field honest about what intelligence actually requires beyond pattern matching.

ARC Prize FoundationVisit↗
anthropic.com

Anthropic Research

Frontier work on interpretability and alignment — understanding what models actually learn.

AnthropicVisit↗
openai.com

OpenAI Engineering

The engineering discipline behind deploying intelligence at scale.

OpenAIVisit↗
jxnl.co

jxnl.co

Practitioner-grade thinking on structured outputs, retrieval, and making LLMs reliable in production.

Jason LiuVisit↗
Featured conversation

An intimate conversation with Elliot Vaucher, co-founder of ogram

A private tech talk on philosophy, machine learning, and how humans and systems reason under complexity.

Watch the talk on YouTube↗