Crosscurrent Code

Essays on technology, culture, and change from the Middle East.

Independent writing by Jad Madi on AI, open source, systems, digital sovereignty, and the human consequences of technical change.

Lead Story

Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work Until They Don't

Skills help agents by stabilizing action, not by injecting facts. But the same abstraction that makes them useful also creates a new failure surface. A deep dive into the Princeton study that breaks down 8,135 trials into 12 failure modes.