Sep 13, 202611 min read
A local-first home assistant running on a single Mac mini: wake word, speech-to-text, a small local model and text-to-speech, plus a sci-fi dashboard that speaks a factual daily briefing from my outdoor cameras. No audio or video leaves the house for inference.
What an AI agent actually is, stripped of buzzwords: the model, the loop, the tools and the protocol. How Cursor, Kiro and MCP each own a different layer of the same architecture — with the production concerns nobody puts on the diagram.
How I connected Customer.io, Meta Ads and Creatify to ChatGPT through MCP apps and plugins, turning three dashboards into a single marketing cockpit that can read audiences, generate video creative and launch campaigns from one conversation.
A practical guide to connecting Cursor to the AWS CloudWatch MCP server: the exact config, a least-privilege read-only IAM role with short-lived credentials, and example prompts for debugging production without opening the console.
Weather apps give you data. Gwhen gives you a time. Here is why I built an app that answers “when is the best time to run, ride or walk today” with a single window instead of a forecast.
A step-by-step guide to running Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi, the plugins that make it worthwhile, and why Matter is changing the role of the bridge rather than killing it.
15-part field guide
Follow the complete reading path from agent foundations and tool design through security, reliability, scale, evals, and observability.
What an AI agent actually is, stripped of buzzwords: the model, the loop, the tools and the protocol. How Cursor, Kiro and MCP each own a different layer of the same architecture — with the production concerns nobody puts on the diagram.
How I connected Customer.io, Meta Ads and Creatify to ChatGPT through MCP apps and plugins, turning three dashboards into a single marketing cockpit that can read audiences, generate video creative and launch campaigns from one conversation.
The most useful AI systems aren't the flashy ones. Here's the lightweight Sunday workflow — one prompt, one shortcut, one routine — that took weekly meal planning off my mental to-do list.
Vibe coding showed us what was possible. The next phase is instructor-led coding — where context, judgment and voice-driven direction turn AI into a team you lead.
A local-first home assistant running on a single Mac mini: wake word, speech-to-text, a small local model and text-to-speech, plus a sci-fi dashboard that speaks a factual daily briefing from my outdoor cameras. No audio or video leaves the house for inference.
A step-by-step guide to running Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi, the plugins that make it worthwhile, and why Matter is changing the role of the bridge rather than killing it.
Weather apps give you data. Gwhen gives you a time. Here is why I built an app that answers “when is the best time to run, ride or walk today” with a single window instead of a forecast.
My first instinct was to put an LLM at the center of my new product. Then I realized the best thing AI could do for it was stay out of the runtime entirely.
New articles on system design, cloud architecture, and practical AI workflows will appear here.
Building high-trust engineering teams
Technical decision-making under uncertainty
Scaling culture as you grow
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More writing on AI-assisted engineering, cloud services, IoT and product development is on the way.
