EngineeringMay 27, 202610 min read
Building AI Tools That Refuse
An AI job-triage tool I open-sourced this week, and the case for designing AI tools around what they refuse to do.
Writing
Technical writing, systems thinking, and notes on maintainability.
Technical writing on systems, boundaries, and maintainability in real-world software.
EngineeringJun 16, 202610 min read
Not All Nondeterminism Is Temperature
My classifier flickered on identical input — so I voted harder, like the last post taught me. It kept flickering. The model was being faithful; my pro…
EngineeringJun 8, 202611 min read
temperature=0 Is Not a Promise
A flag in my JD analyzer flickered on and off across identical runs — same input, same temperature=0, same code. Determinism in an LLM app is somethin…
EngineeringJun 2, 20268 min read
When Not to Reach for LangGraph
I refactored a working 4-step LLM pipeline from a hand-rolled chain to a LangGraph StateGraph to see what the framework buys. For this shape: almost n…
EngineeringJun 11, 20268 min read
Build the Eval Before the Feature
I was about to add hybrid retrieval to my RAG pipeline — the fashionable upgrade. So I built the eval first. It came back 1.0000 across the board and…
EngineeringApr 30, 20269 min read
From One Generalist Agent to a Governed AI Collaboration Model
Ad-hoc AI collaboration looks efficient early on, but starts to break down when real product, UX, engineering, and communication work pile into the sa…
EngineeringMay 11, 20269 min read
Reviewing AI-Generated Pull Requests Requires a Different Standard
Agent-generated code often looks clean, passes tests, and still weakens the system. Teams that review AI pull requests like normal PRs are likely to m…
EngineeringMay 14, 20269 min read
Node’s Permission Model Is Not a Sandbox — and That Matters
Node’s permission model is useful, but many teams are expecting the wrong thing from it. It can reduce accidental overreach by trusted code, but it is…
ArchitectureApr 8, 20268 min read
The Boundary Was the Bug: Designing a Better Outgoing Payments Architecture
Rebuilding outgoing payments is not about more CRUD. The real problem is architecture: unclear ownership, duplicated workflows, and internal tools rep…