Bet onwhatsurvives.
An illustrated argument about which ideas in agentic AI outlast the methods that implement them — a selection lens for placing three-to-ten-year bets, and the paradigm bets it picks.
The Essays
Recursion: The Third Scaling Axis
After depth and width gave us parameters, and the internet gave us data, a third axis arrived almost unannounced: recursion — running the same computation again over its own evolving output. In 2025–26 it showed up independently at four different scales within months of each other. That convergence is the signal.
On-Policy Distillation Quietly Ate Post-Training
While RLVR took the headlines, eight papers in roughly six months made on-policy distillation the quiet workhorse of post-training — student-generated trajectories under dense teacher supervision, sitting between SFT's distribution shift and outcome-RL's sparse credit.
“Ten-year survivors are problem definitions and paradigm bets, not methods. Methods get replaced; definitions get cited.”
This series reads the 2026 literature through one lens — which ideas ride compute, remove a human from a loop, or prove a new capability exists — and places the bets it implies, each carrying the observation that would prove it wrong.
The Long Bet · the long-horizon companion to Harness Engineering