op-ed
Essays and design notes on conversation design and documentation. Written from things I built and measured, including the failures.
The ELIZA Effect in 2026
I spend my days arguing that machines do not understand you. Then I built my own chatbot and gave it the same name as the 1966 original, inspired by all the anonymous women who helped build tech. Here is what is under the hood: SSML scripts, pacing in milliseconds, readability gates, and what two weeks of live logs corrected.
read the notesThe failures my metrics hid
My chatbot answered every question it was asked for three days running, and twice inside one minute it was confidently wrong about itself. A coverage metric counts a wrong answer as a success, which is why the number kept agreeing with me. What the log hides, what it cost, and the tests that now hold it.
read the build logHow we look for knowledge
Someone asked me what conversation design is, and where it sits next to technical documentation. Checking my own short answer took five studies. What people used to judge a source on, what a generated reply stops carrying, who the help reaches first, and which of my own habitual claims turned out to have nothing under them.
read the pieceMore is drafted. A piece goes up once the thing it describes has been built, measured, and allowed to fail at least once.