The Lexicon
The words I keep reaching for. Plain names for the real mechanics of working with agents, building software, and the way people actually learn, a few borrowed from how the brain works.
- Backpressure The signal a team uses to say it is overloaded, before something breaks silently.
- Brainfault The moment you reach for the thing you were about to do and it is simply gone.
- Brainwidth How many problems you can keep alive at once, not how deep you can go on one. With AI, it's the new bottleneck.
- Capability debt The gap between what your people can do and what the work now demands.
- Capability under load Whether people can still do the work when change and pressure spike at once.
- Cognitive brownout The stage before burnout that nobody calls in: judgment dimming under sustained load.
- Functional connectivity (of a team) A team's capability is how well its parts stay in sync, not the sum of its parts.
- Human Acceleration Pointing AI at people instead of around them. Directed acceleration: aim the technology at making humans more capable, faster.
- Learning velocity How fast a team converts change into capability.
- Load-bearing person The one the structure quietly depends on. Pull them and something comes down.
- Mental garbage collection The cleanup the brain runs during sleep. Skip it and working memory degrades.
- Organizational whiplash The reactive thrash when a team lurches between priorities faster than it can absorb them.
- Plasticity budget How much genuinely new learning you can consolidate in a window. Spend it on what compounds.
- Reindex The rebuild you pay after losing the thread, before you can do any real work again.
- The adaptation gap The lag between what a technology makes possible and how fast people and organizations reorganize to use it.
- The augmentation gap The difference between AI that replaces people and AI that makes them more capable.
- The onboarding cliff The capability drop-off around week six, when the welcome fades and the real work starts.
- Thinkput Throughput for thinking: judgment shipped per unit of focus, not hours logged.
- Thrash All switching, no work. What happens the moment you run past your brainwidth.
- Training half-life How fast a skill decays after training, without reinforcement.