Frontier Operations
Suddenly my new sepia imagery is apropos.
I watch every single video Nate B. Jones produces at least once, often twice, and it’s very normal for me to use Perplexity to pull out the transcript. Then I’ll take a bit of the transcript in order to pass on to my coworkers; keeping up is vital.
This one is from Sunday March 1st and I really like this phrase he’s coined …
Frontier Operations:
If you’re going to follow this Substack you’ll get a lot of Problem/Solution statements to help you to develop and maintain these “frontier operations” skills. Watching Nate every single day is how I try to keep up — me, myself, and I — this guy is my guide. And we’re not going to have more than one “must watch” video per week. This may well be the must watch video for the whole quarter.
So … you are either a cog in a machine doing these things, or you’re leading it but trying to fill in the places where you feel your skills are lacking.
Professional Education:
When I watch one of his videos for the second time I am very likely to drop the URL into perplexity.ai and ask it to produce a neat summary based on the transit. Nate is not the only educator to get that treatment, but his are probably 75% of the videos I do.
When I was just a young pup in early middle age, I would knock off about one Cisco Professional certification test a quarter. I finished the Network & Design Professional ratings in 2000, then I did all but the core exam for the other three Professional ratings available in those years. These were largely static goals. You leveled up, then take one exam every three years to stay current. My heavy studies ended twenty five years ago, but I am still a competent operator in that area.
Looking at the conditions around Claude, the stuff I learned just twenty five days ago is no longer current. Opus 4.6 was released on February 5th and I basically gained two full time employees to manage. Education in 2026 is not a destination, it’s the crest of a wave you must ride, while shouting instructions to smart but impulsive assistants.
Current Tooling:
One “employee” is a pretty accomplished programmer who lives in the Claude Code extension in my Google Antigravity IDE. The other is a generalist that lurks in my Claude Desktop app’s Cowork tab. The company has built a “second brain”, based on some work Nate did earlier this year. This contains:
Slack as conversation nexus.
GitHub as code repository, app testing, and specification exercises.
Notion is shared context like GitHub, but for non-coding stuff.
n8n automation was created, but it stumbled.
Claude Cowork is doing the heavy lifting on Notion shared context.
Everyone got Perplexity as Google replacement.
Exa is coming on strong as an alternative to Perplexity.
Hubspot exists to capture incoming leads.
The company has a dozen people at varying levels of involvement, and there are two others besides me who are toolsmiths who’ve built themselves a “harness” like this. I think two more will join that list this week. We’re not AI natives, we’re all 40+ AI immigrants tooling up to face this mildly terrifying brave new world.
Frontier Operations:
There are five components of this cluster of skills.
Boundary Sensing - the intuition required to divide tasks into human vs. agent.
Seam Design - creating smooth transitions between human and agent.
Failure Model Maintenance - knowing how this quarter’s LLMs fail.
Capability Forecasting - a sense of what is imminently possible.
Leverage Calibration - knowing where to put rare, expensive human talent.
OK, reread the current tooling section, then look at this list again. Three tools hold shared knowledge, three are used to modify that shared knowledge, and two exist to find and somewhat to organize incoming knowledge. This setup permits us to create and relocate the seams along the boundaries. We press right up against the failure line for new models, but only in new processes. I’m most likely to be forecasting what we can do next and calibrating humans is a distributed duty.
Conclusion:
That’s how we’re doing it. You gotta do you - something akin to what I described, if you’re a manager, and for the individual just trying to be ready much of that still applies. We’ll have some Problem/Solution posts regarding how to do these things in the very near future.