Archive
Every published article
30 articles, newest first. Search by title, topic or keyword.
- Practical Agent Systems9 min read
Building a Production Agent Runtime
How to separate stateless execution, durable state, fast and long-running paths, autonomy budgets, and the signals that actually govern scale.
- Practical Agent Systems8 min read
Adding Backpressure to an Agent Tool Layer
How queues, bounded drain rates, retry discipline, workload shaping, and admission control protect constrained dependencies.
- Practical Agent Systems7 min read
Designing a Fair Scheduler for Agent Workloads
How reserved capacity, weighted service, aging, and multi-dimensional quotas prevent low-priority work from starving.
- Practical Agent Systems10 min read
Building an Agent Eval Harness From Scratch
How to turn fixtures, trajectories, deterministic graders, calibrated judges, repeated trials, and release gates into evidence.
- Practical Agent Systems9 min read
How to Draw Clear Agent Architectures, Fast
A progressive method for drawing execution paths, ownership boundaries, durability, safety, and evaluation without diagram paralysis.
- Production AI Agents6 min read
An Agent Is a System, Not a Prompt
The useful mental model for agentic software starts with an execution loop, not a clever system message.
- Production AI Agents5 min read
Tools: Where Reasoning Meets the Real World
Tool design is not plumbing. It is one of the most important safety and product-design surfaces in an agent system.
- Production AI Agents8 min read
MCP: A Shared Capability Layer for Agents
Model Context Protocol is most useful when capabilities need to be reusable across agents, clients, and frameworks.
- Production AI Agents6 min read
Context Engineering: Give the Model Less, but Better
The best context window is not the biggest one. It is the smallest trustworthy working set needed for the next decision.
- Production AI Agents5 min read
RAG vs Live Tools: Knowledge Is Not State
Use retrieval for unstructured knowledge and live tools for current authoritative state—and know when the same source needs both.
- Production AI Agents5 min read
Deterministic vs Probabilistic Orchestration
The most important architecture decision in an agent system is deciding which parts should not be agentic at all.
- Production AI Agents6 min read
Reliability: Idempotency, Retries, and Partial Failure
Agentic systems inherit every distributed-systems failure mode—plus a probabilistic decision-maker on top.
- Production AI Agents6 min read
Security: Identity, ACLs, Prompt Injection, and Blast Radius
The model is not a trusted principal. Design as though untrusted content can influence it—and make that influence powerless.
- Production AI Agents4 min read
Human Confirmation Without Confirmation Fatigue
User approval is useful, but it is not authorization—and asking “Are you sure?” before everything is not a product strategy.
- Production AI Agents6 min read
Scaling Agent Systems: Backpressure, Quotas, and Workload Isolation
Ten thousand users is not a capacity number. Peak concurrency, latency SLOs, downstream limits, and workload mix are.
- Production AI Agents5 min read
Tool Sprawl, Routers, and Specialist Agents
When an agent has forty tools, the answer is rarely “write a better prompt and hope.” Reduce the effective action space.
- Production AI Agents6 min read
Evals: The Test Harness Around a Stochastic Application
A production agent needs more than unit tests. It needs a repeatable way to measure outcomes, trajectories, safety, cost, and regressions.
- Production AI Agents5 min read
Ablation, Variance, and Adaptive Sampling
Agent evaluation becomes much clearer once you borrow a small amount of statistical vocabulary—without turning product development into a statistics thesis.
- Production AI Agents6 min read
Production Observability: From Traces to Better Agents
The first month after launch should produce more than dashboards. It should produce a better eval suite and a sharper failure taxonomy.
- Production AI Agents7 min read
The Production Agent Vocabulary Sheet
A compact glossary for architecture discussions, design reviews, and building shared language across teams.
- AI Tooling11 min read
Cursor + Lovable via MCP: The Design Handoff Workflow I Wanted
Cursor owns the product, Lovable gets commissioned for design work, and I decide what comes back. Connecting Cursor to Lovable's MCP server turns two isolated AI tools into one workflow with a clear source of truth.
- IoT & Smart Home14 min read
How I Built JARVIS for My Home: A Local Voice Command Deck on a Mac Mini
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.
- AI16 min read
The Agent Is the Loop: Cursor, Kiro and MCP Without the Buzzwords
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.
- AI9 min read
I Built a Marketing Cockpit in ChatGPT: Customer.io, Meta Ads and Creatify Over MCP
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.
- Cloud Services10 min read
Query CloudWatch Logs From Cursor: Setting Up the AWS CloudWatch MCP Server
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.
- Product Engineering11 min read
Introducing Gwhen: The App That Tells You the Best Time to Go Outside
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.
- IoT & Smart Home16 min read
My Smart Home Runs on a Raspberry Pi. Matter Might Eventually Make That Less Necessary.
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.
- Product Engineering6 min read
Building tinymissions: Why I Removed AI from the Critical Path
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.
- AI8 min read
How I Automated Family Meal Planning with Apple Shortcuts and ChatGPT
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.
- AI12 min read
Vibe Coding Is Dead. Welcome to Instructor-Led Coding.
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.