- Published on
Some attachments do not weaken when resisted. They feed on resistance itself, creating a self-recursive loop in which refusal becomes one of the mechanisms of entanglement.
Systems engineering in the age of AI
Building voice systems, agent fleets, and reality-graded products
I'm Zak El Fassi — Founder & CEO of Talk & Comment, former Head of Messaging Product Partnerships at Meta, and Co-Founder & CTO of INK + PORCELAIN. I write field notes on AI, infrastructure, and human coordination from inside live systems.
- Talk & Comment
- Founder & CEO since 2013
- Meta
- Former Head of Messaging Product Partnerships
- INK + PORCELAIN
- Co-Founder & CTO
- Live systems
- Voice products, agent fleets, and operating notes from production
What I'm building now
Three live fronts: voice, agents, and small-company systems
Talk & Comment, scoped agent operations inside live messaging channels, and the systems behind INK + PORCELAIN. The rule is simple: serve roots, use frontier tools.
Talk & Comment
The voice platform I started in 2013. Today it carries AI-native workflows for learning, assessment, and feedback.
View TACAgent fleets
Scoped agents running across WhatsApp and Telegram with memory, escalation, operating cadence, and patch notes when reality breaks the abstraction.
INK + PORCELAIN
I co-run the technology and supply-chain systems behind a rare-art and one-of-a-kind home objects business.
View I+PLatest essays
- Published on
Once execution gets cheap, misfiled context becomes the expensive part. I solved a support issue from the wrong lane in my OpenClaw workspace and realized the real tax in agent systems is not execution — it’s jurisdiction.- Published on
I was feeding my son banana yogurt when I saw Hugging Face announce a new Papers skill for AI agents. Someone replied: "This needs a CLI." So I told my agents to build it. 45 minutes later, hfpaper was live — a single Go binary that gives any agent a research librarian. What it unlocks is bigger than the tool.- Published on
For two years I lived in tmux. Then I started orchestrating an AI swarm through Telegram. My terminal skills didn't atrophy — they got encoded into a markdown file. Now I'm bringing the swarm home.- Published on
MCP vs CLI is the wrong debate. Both are wrappers around the same thing. The real question is what happens when AI agents stop using our interfaces entirely.
Current writing tracks
The essay series and investigations where the operating notes are being written in public.
Series Map
Agentic AI thesis, coordination rituals, and messaging protocol design.
Agents & Protocols
Build logs, workflow upgrades, and how digital tools actually ship.
Craft & Shipping
Fear loops, psychology of craft, and rituals for resilient minds.
Inner Operating Systems
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Practical diagnostics for products, teams, and institutions navigating AI-driven change.
Subscribe to the systems briefings. Practical diagnostics for products, teams, and institutions navigating AI-driven change. — Occasional briefs that connect agentic AI deployments, organizational design, and geopolitical coordination. No filler - only the signal operators need.