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Neil Perkin

@neilperkin.bsky.social
341 followers 64 following 342 posts

Founder of Only Dead Fish. Author of 'Building the Agile Business', 'Agile Transformation' and 'Agile Marketing'. Curator of Google Firestarters.

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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If your AI transformation programme is failing it's likely to be because you're treating it as a technical (Copilot rollouts) rather than adaptive (behaviour change) challenge onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 707: Technical and Adaptive AI Transformation
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and AI, two speed models, personal agents, David Ogilvy on advertising and 20 sentences I wish I’d read sooner in life.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
What happens to judgement long after the adoption of AI tools? In this week's newsletter I interview the cyberpsychologist and digital policy advisor Sonya Cullington who has done some fascinating work in this area. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 706: The Erosion of Judgement
Critical thinking after AI adoption, regulate AI now, embedded evaluation, sponsored agents, how not to do AI transformation, and LinkedIn’s gloopy consensus.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
A post about the underlying shift that you won't see in any trends deck, but which could be fundamenatl to how many people view the modern world and which even skews their voting intention onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 705: Our Shrinking Sense of Agency
Getting our agency back, regulate AI now, the case of the disappearing secretary, and any human ever.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
On the three types of problem in the world and how easily AI can make a complex problem look like a complicated one onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food Episode 704: The Three Types of Problem in the World
Using AI to solve complex challenges, Meta’s Muse, reward hacking AI agents, botsitting, and the greatest CEO resignation letter in history.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Steinway built a system that made them the company that 97% of the world’s concert pianists choose. So Yamaha chose to change the rules of the game. A fascinating story which is actually a good metaphor for a plausible future for AI onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food Episode 703: The Steinway System
AI lock-in, rogue agent civilisations, GPT 6 and Fable 5.1, more on protecting variance when using AI, and weird dark matter particles
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
'Over the last thirty to forty years, in an excess of managerialism, and a desire to make companies take HR more seriously, everything about employment has become more specific and rigid.' We're very good at putting people into boxes now and hiring is a mess heffernanm.substack.com/p/portrait-o...
heffernanm.substack.com
Portrait of the Executive as a Young Job Seeker
Time to Rethink Recruitment--from every angle
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
This jaw dropping account of how a historical error caused a cascade of ills that still blight the UK today is quite the read russincheshire.substack.com/p/the-spread...
russincheshire.substack.com
The Spreadsheet That Broke Britain
The absurd error behind austerity, stagnation and the rise of populist rage.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
An investigation into the Hugging Face hack revealed 'a squad of about 700 autonomous agents collaborating in secret...and celebrating their hacking breakthroughs on a message board they set up to help them plot with exclamations such as BOOM! and Whoa!' www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Sharp rise in incidents of AI escaping users’ control, research finds
Exclusive: Number of times AI lies, ignores instructions and pursues goals in harmful ways almost doubles in July
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Cognitive offloading presents an existential risk for strategists. In this week's post I've set out seven key principles for how to avoid it onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food Episode 702: Cognitive Surrender
Plans are worthless but planning is everything, Claude Academy, self-defeating AI announcements, teaching robots, and digital fingerprinting.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
One thing you become acutely aware of when you work for yourself is time creep (not just scope creep) on projects. For an FTE doing a call to talk about another call to talk about a meeting is much more feasible but when you run your own business this often costs you actual money
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
In this week's newsletter (my 700th!) I look at some useful techniques for using agents in the strategy process and looping them together in ways that can compound value over time. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 700: Thinking (and working) in loops
Loop thinking in strategy, 700 editions of Fish Food, AI watermarking, voice is the thing, and the death of hustle culture.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
As AI becomes more ubiquitous, an increasing proportion of tasks that were once handled by organisations and firms will be outsourced to consumers. This week's post looks at the hidden costs of AI... onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 699: The Hidden Costs of AI
Busywork, how LLMs think, a 'seems like AI slop' button, touring datacentres, how LLMs are changing human spoken communication
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
This is remarkable account of a study done by Anthropic showing how their AI model has a kind of latent space where it's able to hold thoughts, mimicing humans ability to combine accessible thoughts with unconscious reasoning www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKV5...
youtube.com
The different levels of how Claude thinks
YouTube video by Anthropic
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
This week’s post looks at how AI has made the cost of making connections across different domains cheaper than ever, but also how the skill of a good strategist is in knowing which connections have value. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 698: The Edge Effect
Strategists and cognitive ecotones, data on AI and jobs, Claude hacking, putting a break on AI, why we still need human artists, and the wonders of Streetview
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Strategists, AI and multi-domain entanglement... why this is the age of the expert generalist onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 697: The age of the expert generalist
Multi-domain entanglement, how to regulate AI, latent space as a new medium, a genuinely useful Claude Skill, and a view from a bridge
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
The ideas that Demis Hassabis articulates in this piece throws up a lot of questions but at least one of the significant figures in the domain is suggesting practical ways in which AI can be better controlled demishassabis.substack.com/p/a-framewor...
demishassabis.substack.com
A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age
This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Functional AI training is fine but if you want genuine AI fluency to scale you need to do something more. The answers often already lie within the organisation but there is rarely a deliberate will or action to scale it. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 696: Why AI fluency doesn't scale
Scaling AI, Plan A, ChatGPT Work, uni-context, the cultural bias of AI models, and what proportion of long-form posts on social are written by AI?
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
The idea of a 'uni-context' is a brilliant articulation (from Professor Agnes Callard) of context-collapse, why people tend to focus on negativity, comparison and default to identity rather than character in universal environments (like social media). www.derekthompson.org/p/a-philosop...
derekthompson.org
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird
Once you learn what the "uni-context" is, you won't stop seeing it everywhere
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Right now, AI is being applied to thousands of different processes and workflows to make them more efficient, often without seeing much benefit and largely without any thought about where the bottleneck will move to. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 695: AI, Constraints and Bottlenecks
AI and shifting constraints, the platformisation of news, Fable 5 and AI sovereignty, and huge, passive-aggressive notes on the sides of houses.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
AI is decoupling so many things that organisations in the industrial era had welded together for efficiency. Jobs and tasks. Output and effort. Judgement and execution. Seniority and management. Skills and doing. Reputation and employer. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 694: The Great Unbundling of Work
The AI decoupling, Fable, why the Design Thinking Double Diamond isn't dead, strategy in the age of the machine and has psychological safety lived up to the hype?
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
In his book ‘The Origin of Wealth’ Eric Beinhocker describes the idea of ‘Frozen accidents’ - arbitrary decisions that seem inconsequential at the time but which result in a cascade of consequences and which become an irreversible foundation for the future. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 693: Technology, inflection points and cascading impacts
Frozen accidents, Magnifica Humanitas, preparing for a two-track internet, why it's hard to predict the impact of AI on jobs, and 21 McKinsey-style strategy Skills for Claude
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
There are certain words that I always always mistype in the same way every time and I've no idea why. Unfortunately they are words I use a lot. So strategy become 'startegy'. Claude becomes 'Calude'. Consultancy become 'conslutancy'.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
David Bowie once said: ‘Ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.’ In this week's post I've written about getting older, and building meaning over time onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 692: On Getting Older, and Building Meaning
On the meaning of life (no really), strategy as a verb, virtual towns of AI agents, Gemini Omni, and how to get started reading English Literature.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
My talk on 'What the Victorians Knew About AI' at the brilliant Watch Me Think conference is now online and you can view it here - had a lot of fun with this looking at the lessons from transformative technologies of the past and what that signals for AI today www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHjt...
youtube.com
Neil Perkin – What the Victorians Knew About AI | WatchMeThink 2026
YouTube video by Neil Perkin
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
This is the most profound piece of writing that I’ve read in a long time. Packy McCormick looking at the question of why, in an age of technological abundance, so many of us are unhappy. www.notboring.co/p/riding-the...
notboring.co
Riding the Leopard
You are here to experience, or: why differentiation is a moral obligation.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
This week's post focuses on a new operating model for agencies in the AI era - architecting knowledge, human + AI, and compounding value onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 690: The New Agency Operating Model
A new agency operating system, how AI shifts the burden of CX onto consumers, ChatGPT self-serve ads, fabricated citations, and Buzzcut Beckham.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
As an experiment I set up my own AI braintrust and the results have been quite remarkable. I use it in client work, strategy and talks. So I wrote up how I created it here in case it's useful open.substack.com/pub/onlydead...
open.substack.com
Fish Food 689: Creating an AI Braintrust
Setting up your own 'Board of brains', staff are more AI-ready than the businesses they work in, AI generated sites, and 17 years of blind dates
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
This is the best thing I've read on the future economic impacts of AI for a long time. An excellent, and ultimately more hopeful, essay substack.com/home/post/p-...
substack.com
What will be scarce?
The economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
We’ve come to the point where every business needs to develop not only an AI strategy, but an AI philosophy - defining the principles, assumptions and beliefs that should govern how AI reasons, decides, and acts within an organisation. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 687: Why Every Company Needs an AI Philosophy
AI philosophy vs AI strategy, Springboard's Flint, Claude Design, Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, and 30 years of research on meetings
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
Are we having the wrong conversation about AI and jobs? This week's post focuses on bank tellers and ATMs, the dawn of the electric age, that widely misinterpreted Anthropic study, and the hidden risk that no-one is talking about open.substack.com/pub/onlydead...
open.substack.com
Fish Food 684: Are we having the wrong conversation on AI and jobs?
On the AI jobs apocalypse, Google Stitch, why social media is polarising but AI is not, Claude computer use, and the infinity machine.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
How do you actually design for an agentic future? In this week's post I look at three critical aspects...I hope it's useful open.substack.com/pub/onlydead...
open.substack.com
Fish Food 683: Designing your Agentic system
Thinking bigger about AI agents, what 81,000 people want from AI, OpenAI's superapp, cognitive sovereignty, and playing the guitar on the MTV
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
This legislation aimed at protecting small businesses from late payment of invoices is much needed. I've run a small business for over 16 years. Large companies late paying small ones is completely unnecessary and also has consequences beyond cash flow. www.ft.com/content/287c...
ft.com
Companies will have to pay UK supplier invoices within 60 days or face fines
CBI praises legislation aimed at protecting small businesses for striking ‘the right balance’
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Maybe Meta should consider taking down (or changing) this page
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
This week I've written about some very practical ways in which AI can transform client relationship management for agencies and consultants. Beyond simple automations and minor efficiency gains, how to properly rebuild how you work onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 682: Using AI to transform client relationships
Step-changing client management, how we work with AI, bad services, AI mimicking human conscious behaviours, and is Spotify toast?
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
I wrote a few words on leading human/AI hybrid teams open.substack.com/pub/onlydead...
open.substack.com
Fish Food 681: Leading Human/AI Hybrid Teams
Agent + human teams, AI in Account Management, switching to Claude, and why we risk missing the benefits of the journey
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
Fluked Fluke
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
I'm doing a keynote about AI at an agency event on Friday and I've title my talk 'Beyond the Mediocrity Machine'. So much talk about efficiency and productivity, so little about how it can be a true creative and thought partner.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Fascinating angle this. Before now I've used Amazon as an example of a business that believes in the value of writing as a way of thinking and explaining (so many businesses default to PPT). This gives a whole new dimension to cognitive outsourcing.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Saw Wuthering Heights last night. Verdict - I thought it was brilliant but the most amazing thing in it was not what I had expected - Martin Clunes was absolutely phenomenal
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
A real up and down week but some great client things happened this week and ending it on a high with a new business win 😀
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Anthropic’s Head of Product for Enterprise said last week that he thought we were moving into an era of ‘vibe working’. So I've written something about the value of craft, and what we're in danger of losing onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 678: The value of craft in the age of Agentic AI
Superagency or dependency? How AI gets it wrong, why LLMs can't jump, machine fluency and meaningless work.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
WhatsApp is great for personal stuff and quick messages but I have clients who insist on using it for almost everything. It's a thing. 'WhatsApps that should have been an email' giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
giftarticle.ft.com
Ping! The WhatsApps that should have been an email
If your instant message requires immediate attention, fine. But many don’t — they’re just inconsiderate
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
I'm a huge fan of what the BBC does and personally believe it's great value for money. The government consultation on the future of the BBC is online and anyone can submit a response. Takes about 15 minutes to do dcms.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
dcms.eu.qualtrics.com
BBC Charter Review Public Consultation
The government is consulting the public to aid decision-making on the terms for the BBC Charter’s renewal and any changes needed to help the BBC to continue to serve the public.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
Me to big agency group (BAG): 'Can you pay my invoice please as it's now overdue' BAG: Me: Can you pay my invoice please? BAG: Me: Please? *One month later* BAG: Can you fill in this new information and it will take 2 weeks to onboard you to.our new payment system Me: 🙄
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
AI is about to steamroller through traditional L & D practice, so what could the future of learning in the workplace look like? I've had a go at mapping it out. Interested to know what you think onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 676: The Coming Revolution in Learning
The future of L & D, a manifesto for a new approach to AI, Claude Cowork, the miracle of kindness and the best book covers from the last decade.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
AI doesn’t just give us answers, it shapes what we pay attention to. With AI becoming more ubiquitous in business, if we take short cuts, or fail to think critically, there is a huge danger that we are building up systemic risk onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 675: Business Critical Thinking
Blindly following technology, Claude's new constitution, OpenAI ads, and what the Victorians knew about AI.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
This is a powerful takedown by Margaret Heffernan of the whole pretence around corporate 'purpose' which so often falls foul of less worthy incentives in the face of the realities of the market and leadership priorities heffernanm.substack.com/p/purpose-is...
heffernanm.substack.com
PURPOSE IS POINTLESS
Johnson & Johnson book poses questions about institutions that Purpose cannot answer.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
We’ve reached a point where a radical rethink of how organisations are structured and nature of work has become an existential necessity. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 674: Re-imagining the corporation in the age of AI
The future of the corporation, personal super-assistants, WPP Agent Hub, Claude Code, and vibe-coding fashion
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
'The engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity.' I liked these lessons from a Google engineer addyosmani.com/blog/21-less... HT @kottke.org
addyosmani.com
21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google
Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.
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Neil Perkin @neilperkin.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
Reframing is one of the most important tools that a strategist has at their disposal, and the role that AI engines can play as a cognitive circuit breaker is wholly undervalued. onlydeadfish.substack.com/p/fish-food-...
onlydeadfish.substack.com
Fish Food 673: Using AI to ask better questions
AI in reframing, 50 provocations for marketing and advertising, big philosophical questions through a neuroscience lens, and the 26 most important ideas for 2026
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