Cognitive Modes
Your AI Output Is Fine. That's the Problem.
The convergent/divergent framework from my AI pipeline project was a theory built on one domain. I tested it against Anthropic's knowledge-work-plugins across six domains, then against a professional reasoning benchmark. Pipeline won in five of the original six, then lost on the benchmark — and the failure sharpened the thesis into something more honest: pipelines earn their cost only when the correct output can't be produced without seeing the specific input data.
Context Carries Cognitive Mode — Evidence & Methods
The companion evidence post to 'Context Carries Cognitive Mode' — containing the full experiment designs, version comparisons, and claims tables. Each section is self-contained. Every claim is mapped to its evidence and its limitations.
Context Carries Cognitive Mode
I removed a quality-checking section from an AI prompt. The prompt got smaller. The output got deeper. Same model, same data, 70% of the context window unused. This wasn't a capacity problem.