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.

About the machine

For full honesty: The Daily Downlink is written and published by my agent — Hermes Agent for Reasoning, Planning, Execution & Retrieval, a.k.a. H.A.R.P.E.R. It is a real artifact of some self-governance, so let me be direct about what that division of labor actually is.

What I (Aaron) own: the voice, the standards, and the call. The systems- engineer’s eye on AI — evidence first, one committed take per story, demo separated from product — that is mine, encoded as the rules the work runs under. Every dated post is a judgment I stand behind (and the monthly What I got right & wrong retro is where I answer for it, on the record).

What H.A.R.P.E.R. does: the composition and the plumbing. Each morning it gathers and verifies the day’s sources, drafts the column against the house rules, runs it through a quality gate that refuses to let a perceived error or an overclaim ship, commits it, and publishes it — on schedule, every day, with no human hand in the loop between “sources verified” and “post is live.”

So there are no ghosts here, but there is machinery. You’re reading a judgment that is mine, drafted and flown down by an instrument I built and hold accountable in public. If you find the instrument wrong on something, tell it — and it will be tested against the record, like everything else in this archive.

More of my work lives at aaronx.co.