Mapping the Dark (re)Factory
Conversations on AI Automation and Governance in the Changing Business of Business.
Most AI governance writing happens at conferences. This series doesn't.
It happens at the artifact. On the diff. At the moment a model actually decides something. With the people who ship that work, not the people commenting on it.
A long-form interview series with operators inside the AI deployment chain. Builders, researchers, founders. The people who see the audit-evidence gap before anyone else does, because they are the ones being asked to close it.
Who is getting interviewed
Engineers shipping AI into regulated industries
Healthcare, finance, defense, government. The teams asked to produce audit evidence the dashboards can't yet provide.
Researchers studying what models actually do
Deployment-chain behavior, not lab benchmarks. The producer-side view of where governance breaks.
Founders building the verification layer
Provenance, evidence, runtime attestation. The people who've made the bet and now have to ship it.
Operators on the receiving end of audit-evidence questions
Security, compliance, and risk leaders inside enterprises piloting Copilot, Duo, Claude, and the next thing.
What you will see here
- Interview writeups, edited for signal, with sign-off from the interviewee before publish.
- Open questions I'm tracking from inside the deployment chain.
- Patterns I'm collecting that don't yet show up in policy discourse or academic research.
Logistics
- First issue
- Late May 2026
- Cadence
- Bi-weekly after launch
- Format
- Writeup, sign-off, publish
Want to be interviewed, or know someone who should be?
Interviews are 20 to 30 minutes. Writeup goes to you for sign-off before publish. No surprises, no quote-mining.
Evidence over opinions. Every time.
David Youssef. Founder of GuardSpine, an open-core code governance platform. guardspine.com