Tonic Blog

The 2026 VerizonData Breach Investigations Report is not subtle. Attackers are getting in through unpatched systems, exposed third parties, weak identity controls, and the same messy handoffs that security teams have been struggling with for years.

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AI is changing the speed, scale, and economics of exploitation.

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Though there certainly is market noise around the Mythos Effect, beneath it is a real shift in risk - one that forces security teams to move from vulnerability assessment and reporting to rapid, contextual exposure reduction.

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We’ve spent decades trying to automate the human out of the system. But in the world of agents, the human is a core design element - the only component capable of handling the Polanyi Paradox.

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This series explores the messy reality of building agentic workflows in the wild, moving past clean demos to address the volatile data, shifting contexts, and high-stakes consequences of real-world organizations.

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In Part 1, we used Hayek’s theory of knowledge to establish a fundamental constraint: the knowledge required to run complex systems is dispersed, local, and often tacit. It exists in fragments embedded in people, processes, and environments, and cannot be fully centralized without losing the context that makes it meaningful.

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