Knowledge Half-Life

---

Every piece of knowledge has a half-life — some span decades, some span months — and the entire architecture of this site exists because of that fact. A course, or an archive, that treats “how to structure a technical argument” and “the current best prompting pattern for a specific tool” as the same kind of content ends up doing a disservice to both: the durable material gets buried under things that will be outdated within a year, and the timely material gets treated with more permanence than it deserves.

So Corpus is split in two by half-life. Human Skills hold the material with a long half-life — techniques that don’t meaningfully change even as the tools around them do. The material with a short half-life — genuinely useful right now, explicitly labeled as needing periodic revisiting rather than presented as settled fact — comes in two forms: AI-Assisted Workflows, run by a human with an AI tool’s help, and Agent Skills, downloadable files an agent runs directly.

This is philosophy, not technique — the why behind the site’s whole structure. The applied, practical version of the same idea — a set of questions for sizing up any specific thing you’re about to spend time learning, right now, regardless of what it is — lives as its own page: Knowledge Half-Life in Human Skills. Read this page for the reasoning behind the split; read that one when you’re actually trying to decide how much to invest in learning something new.