About
Dispatches from the trenches of the shift.
The Cognitive Shift is a snapshot of what's actually happening as AI changes how humans think and work. It holds several publications, each with its own editor, a community of operators, and a training practice. None of it is commentary from the outside: everything here comes from deploying AI swarms on real problems, failing, learning, and writing it down as it happens.
Who runs this
Rhys Fisher
I build AI capabilities before they're table stakes.
I started in marketing and go-to-market strategy, moved into measurement, analytics infrastructure and customer data, and now build AI swarms: long-running agents configured to deliver outcomes on their own.
The first-principles habit comes from paragliding, where misreading conditions has real consequences. The same honesty about what's actually working is what I try to bring to ventures and to this publication. Also a cyclist, and a designer of titanium gravel bikes.
Built with AI, so far
- Scout Market research by agent fleet: the market graph, the whitespace, the buyer simulation.
- AskRally Synthetic user testing with calibrated personas. Co-founded with Michael Taylor.
- Swarm Intelligence A field guide 86 AI agents wrote overnight, published on Leanpub.
- FlowScout Open-source research engine that walks citation graphs and mines papers for the patterns a product bet can be built on.
- Others
- FlowSales Deal scoring against MEDDPICC.
- Sitroom Real-time AI on data streams.
- Mimir Model routing for OpenWork.
- Flow OS Claude Code second brain.
- Crewline Phone-first field service software.
- Fizz Dance videos from Strava.
- Ride Ready Strava-driven bike maintenance alerts.
- Designing Evals for Agentic Systems Book on agent evals.
- Discord Transcriber Discord calls transcribed into git.
- G2 Scraper Unmet-need detection from reviews.
- Howler Bikes Titanium gravel bikes.
- More every week.
Contributors
More than one voice.
Each publication has an editor; each article has its author. Contributions arrive as pull requests and are read before they go live.
Want to write here? Ask Rhys for access; contributors get a visual editor and a pull-request path, and every piece is read before it goes live.
Follow the work.
One email a week, or apply to the community and join the conversation.
One email a week on what we deployed, what broke, and what it taught us.
One email per week. Unsubscribe anytime.
Swarm Operators is a private circle of operators, builders, and leaders dissolving cognitive bottlenecks. Entry by application.
Three short questions follow, then a human reads your application.