Hi. My name is Daniel Miessler and I'm an AI and cybersecurity researcher and founder in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've been building and writing online since 1999.
Right now I'm excited, but also worried, about humanity's future.
We've been trained for centuries to build our identities around work we don't really care about: our title, our place in a hierarchy, and our usefulness to someone else's company. And now AI is about to let most of those companies bring most knowledge work in-house.
That will be extraordinarily disruptive, but it's also an opportunity, because being a corporate drone was never a peak human experience. So many of us spend our best hours, days, and years dreading Monday and sitting in pointless meetings. It's no way to live, and it never has been.
I'm excited about AI's potential to give people a more meaningful alternative: one based on who they are and what they're trying to achieve.
So that's what I do. I help people (and companies) articulate and pursue their Ideal State. That's the loop above. LifeOS runs it for a person, and Vector runs it for a company.
- Using AI to upgrade people, so everyone gets the starting conditions the lucky already have. That's the whole mission, really.
- Security, which I did for a long time and still can't stop thinking about. Once you've watched enough systems fail, you build everything differently.
- Publishing what I think as I think it: around 3,000 essays since 1999 and a weekly show. I think better out loud, and it's the best way I know to find the people who care about the same things.
Everything below is that loop, run on something.
LifeOS
The AI harness that runs the loop: it captures what you ultimately want and carries that intent into every task, then checks the output against it. Formerly PAI.
TELOS
A framework for writing down deep context about what matters to you, so an AI can actually work toward it.
Daemon
A personal API framework from the Universal Daemonization idea in my 2016 book. Mine is live at daemon.danielmiessler.com.
Substrate
A framework for understanding what humans are, what we want, and what progress actually means.
TheAlgorithm
The general problem-solving loop itself, written down: verifiable Ideal State Criteria and the climb toward them.
SecLists
The security tester's companion: wordlists and payloads.
Fabric
An open-source framework for augmenting humans using AI, built on crowdsourced prompts for extracting wisdom, analyzing security, summarizing content, and hundreds more.
More projects (earlier and experimental work)
Each of these is the loop pointed at one question, and a few of them are live systems that keep running on their own.
The pieces that carry the current thesis:
From Prompt Engineering to Intent Engineering, I Think AGI Just Happened, The Three Components of Becoming AI Antifragile, The Coming Divide: AI-Native or Left Behind, A Unified Theory For How AI Will Affect Jobs, and The Most Durable Human Value.
Latest posts (auto-updated daily):
- Custom Content for Everyone
- AGI Prediction Update (2025-2028)
- Introducing UL Gauntlet, a Benchmark for How Well AI Explains
- I Write My Own Stage Directions Now
- My Thoughts on Renaming AI to Super Intelligence
- Harness Gardens
- Our AI Agents Should Pay the People Who Help Them
All 3,000 or so essays are at danielmiessler.com/blog.
- A Conversation With Snehal Antani
- A Conversation with Manoj
- Evolution, Lit RPG and AI Harnesses
- A Conversation with Abhishek
- My Whole AI Harness Exists to Solve One Problem
The show is Unsupervised Learning on YouTube.
Blog, Newsletter, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Books, All repos
