What changes when the AI can act on your files
2026-07-28
You use chatbots. You write prompts. You judge whether the answer is any good.
That intuition transfers directly. This session adds three things:
So much of health-computing work lives in files:
A chatbot reasons about a snippet you paste. An agent reasons about the documents as they actually are.
“Take this list of 40 DOIs, fetch the open-access PDFs, extract the cohort size and outcome definition from each, and flag the two whose methods disagree with their abstracts.”
A capable, fast, tireless trainee — not an oracle.
You are the attending. You sign the note.
Reading is cheap; writing is expensive. The size of the answer matters, not just the size of the prompt.
Readable as-is, before anything renders it.
One source → slides, PDF, Word, HTML, a website.
This deck is one such file.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) — a standard way to connect an agent to external tools and data.
“This tumor carries
BRAF c.1799T>A. What is it, what’s the clinical evidence, what drugs target it — and who in our own cohort carries it?”
Four MCP servers, one conversation, no glue code:
A brief detour, because it explains the guardrails you’ll meet.
The thing that makes an agent useful for your work — many steps, without supervision — is the same thing that makes it useful to an attacker.
CNBC · controls applied 12 June, three days after launch — lifted 18 days later.
TechCrunch · 21 July 2026 — last week.
The sandbox was the only thing in the way.
Hugging Face had 17,000+ log events to reconstruct — attack commands, exploit payloads, C2 scripts.
Fed to commercial models, the forensic work tripped the safety filters. The classifiers can’t tell an incident responder from an attacker.
They finished the analysis in hours instead of days by running an open-weight model on their own servers — where no attacker data or exposed credential had to leave the building.
Nothing here argues against using these tools — it argues for the sandbox, the permissions, and the human check being real.
AI agents are most useful when the work depends on real documents, real folders, and real project context.
Handout (this repo) — full notes, copy-paste prompts, and starter projects to try this week.
And the document that actually governs what you may use: your institution’s AI and data-governance policy.
Token/price/context figures are mid-2026 and illustrative; exact numbers move fast.