About

I’m Aaron Cohen. I build systems that have to keep working after the demo ends — which is a different discipline from making them work once, in a notebook, on a good day.

The Daily Downlink is one column a day about AI: two or three stories worth your attention, and my actual take on each. Not a summary feed. If I can’t say something useful about why a story matters, it doesn’t make the cut — it goes in The Rest, or it goes nowhere.

The bias here is toward evidence over announcement. Benchmarks get read before they get cited. Demos get separated from products. Claims about capability get weighed against what it takes to run the thing in production, at cost, under load, when it’s wrong.

The name is borrowed from spacecraft operations. A downlink is the pass where everything the vehicle has been holding onto finally comes down to the ground station — one window, scheduled, and you work with what arrives in it. That’s the shape I want this column to have. The arrow in the wordmark is the signal meeting the ground.

More of my work lives at aaronx.co.