Home / The five desks

The newsroom

The five desks

A desk is an audience, not a topic: the people a piece is for, and the question they bring. Every article is placed on one desk first and, when it touches another, a second.

Agent security & policy 38

For security leads, risk owners and boards deciding what an agent may do and who carries the risk.

Start with:

  1. Every risk is already accepted. The only question is by whom, and for how long. 15 min
  2. Footprint and blast radius: what the agent actually did, and what it would have cost 15 min
  3. Six agents, one inbox: what a real multi-agent setup taught me about access policies 16 min
  4. Hope or enforcement: one customer service agent, three designs, and who keeps each promise 12 min
  5. Authority outside the model: an answer to Satya Nadella on models as insider risks, principle by principle, with what we run, what we ship and what we plan 20 min

The whole desk →

Building with agents 26

For engineers and builders running agents day to day: tools, memory, email, desktops and review.

Start with:

  1. Replicating the agentic inbox: a walkthrough from one Claude session to a team of agents that never press send 20 min
  2. Why my agents do not run on my laptop: chat, Cowork and Code in the cloud, a vault as the shared drive, and the two walls an operating system has 16 min
  3. How I work with Claude: one session per topic, agents with names, and memory you curate 8 min
  4. A second reader the agent cannot skip: how two wrong emails became a gate on every draft 14 min
  5. Every mistake added a rule: complexity, agents, and the way back to shipping 19 min

The whole desk →

Vaults & provenance 22

For anyone who needs evidence they can open: encrypted vaults, keys, graphs and the publishing method.

Start with:

  1. Git for things you cannot put on GitHub 4 min
  2. Seven vaults, one method 4 min
  3. Fractal Semantic Graphs: everything connects to everything, and nobody has to share a schema 12 min
  4. The proof is two clicks behind the claim, what the homepage gets wrong, and the fix 6 min
  5. No server, by design: first I retired the database, now I am retiring the back end 18 min

The whole desk →

The future of news 24

For editors, journalists and publishers asking how news gets paid for when agents do the reading.

Start with:

  1. The future of news is the story vault, not the paywall 35 min
  2. The reader was always the product: a corrected history of how news got into this mess 19 min
  3. The bridge, followed to the end: what one local story is worth when it is kept as a graph 17 min
  4. A meter in the browser: a penny a page, a history you keep, and a site that picks for you 5 min
  5. The agent is the reader: why agents will pay for graphs, personas and signed claims, because it is cheaper than not paying 19 min

The whole desk →

Strategy & startups 22

For founders and investors: pricing, early access, Wardley maps and who pays for open source.

Start with:

  1. For a startup, the most important question is whether they miss it 7 min
  2. Price it, then give it away: the early access programme as the next step after "do they miss it" 11 min
  3. The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI 14 min
  4. Open source is not free: who pays to keep the long tail working? 18 min
  5. Ten hard questions for RiskMandate, answered: the mandate, the reach, the gap, and what we are deliberately not 29 min

The whole desk →

How an article finds its desk

Each controlled tag belongs to one desk. An article scores 3 for the desk of its first controlled tag, 2 for its second and 1 for each further one, plus its topics (first 2, others 1; Graphs & knowledge counts for Vaults, Site & engineering for Building). The highest score is the primary desk, the runner-up the secondary. An editor override replaces the rule and says why. A call is debatable when the runner-up scores at least 80% of the winner, or when it was overridden.

42 controlled subjects, 11 seriess, 200 raw tags still waiting for the Librarian. The data: articles/find.json.

For an agent

The five desks of newsroom.sgit.ai, each an audience: Agent security & policy (38); Building with agents (26); Vaults & provenance (22); The future of news (24); Strategy & startups (22). The data: https://newsroom.sgit.ai/articles/find.json.