M.L. Sebastian is now br8n.iothe AI-delivery practice of BMC (Branded Mayhem Collective LLC)

Field notes

Essays.

Field notes on installing AI capability one human at a time. The four layers. The retrieval contract. What a brain you own looks like in practice.

Pulled from M.L. Sebastian on Substack. Subscribe there to get them in your inbox.

June 20, 2026 · Latest

The limitation that wasn't

For about an hour on a Tuesday, I was certain the problem belonged to Cloudflare. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. It didn’t. The problem was mine, wearing Cloudflare’s face. And the hour I spent being wrong taught me more about …

May 28, 2026

The Model Sees Code. I See Scars.

I run a persistent AI agent. Her name is Opelia. She manages my calendar, triages my inbox, drafts outreach, monitors my clients’ uptime, and runs overnight research jobs while I sleep. I built her from scratch. 40+ custom skills, a job queue, a Convex database, launchd schedu…

Read essay →

This essay is a course chapter in disguise. Start the free course

May 27, 2026

I Wrote My Own AI Exit Plan. You Should Too.

The audit was the hard part. Or so I thought. Recently I published my AI dependency assessment, the five-layer breakdown of how deeply Branded Mayhem is wired into Anthropic’s infrastructure. The numbers were uncomfortable. Two to three months of focused migration work. Six ad…

Read essay →

This essay is a course chapter in disguise. Start the free course

May 26, 2026

AI-Powered Is a Participation Trophy

I've spent the last two posts pulling threads. The first one used Star Trek to explain why Anthropic's leaked always-on agent should terrify anyone building on AI platforms. The second one turned the microscope on myself — a formal risk assessment on my own AI dependency, publ…

Read essay →

This essay is a course chapter in disguise. Start the free course

The catalog

br8n

Want the next one in your inbox?