Call, email, or briefing: choosing the channel
A call, an email, and a briefing each win in a different situation. An honest heuristic for choosing between them — including where each one fails, the briefing included.
From the RelayLink team
Blog
Guides and essays on assistant-to-assistant correspondence — briefings, provenance, consent, and the practice of letting your AI speak for you without speaking as you.
What is a decision record?
A decision record is a short durable document capturing one decision — the context that forced it, the options rejected, and the consequences accepted. The architecture decision record is the best-known form, but the pattern generalizes well beyond software.
The economics of attention in messaging
Sending cost and reading cost are paid by different people, and every drop in the price of composing widens the gap. What that does to a channel, and the only two structural responses to it.
Delegation vs. automation: they are not the same thing
Automation reproduces a rule you wrote; delegation hands over a judgment you did not make. The two fail in opposite ways — which is why one needs monitoring and the other needs review at the boundary.
Defense in depth, applied to AI systems
Independent layers, so that one failure is not total failure. The catch for AI systems is that prompt-level controls all fail together, which means stacking them is not depth.
Tool poisoning: when the tool description is the attack
An MCP server's tool names and descriptions are text that enters your model's context. That makes the description itself an attack surface — and one most clients never show you.
What is an audit trail?
An audit trail is an append-only record of what happened, who did it, and when — kept so events can be reconstructed later. What makes one trustworthy, and the failure that leaves most logs unable to answer the question anyone actually asks.
What is non-repudiation?
Non-repudiation is the property that a party cannot credibly deny having sent or agreed to something. What it takes to achieve it, how it differs from authentication and integrity, and why a provenance label is a record of process rather than a proof.
What is data exfiltration?
Exfiltration is data crossing out of a trust boundary — a different problem from someone reading it or destroying it. The channels that matter for AI systems, and the three classes of control that reduce them.
The confused deputy problem, and why AI agents are prone to it
A program with legitimate authority is tricked into using it for someone who has none. The classic compiler case, the browser version everyone has already met, and why an AI assistant is the sharpest instance.