IDEAS, DECISIONS & LESSONS
Notes on AI, architecture and building useful products.
14 articles
20 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
agentic engineering
Two days after writing up Routines, I ran my own morning through Hive: a verified AWS + GitHub brief at 08:30, a feature-planning room, a weekly dependency bump that opens a PR and waits for my click, and budgets at four heights. Here is what ran, what broke, and what I fixed — a dead model alias was killing my rooms without a sound.
Read more18 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
agentic engineering
One day reading n8n, Dify, CrewAI, LangGraph, Paperclip, Lindy, AgentKit and two dozen other agent products to answer one question: what do small teams actually pay for? Not orchestration. They pay for a repeated job that runs correctly, gets checked, and doesn't wreck the bill. Here is the feature I chose to build for Hive, and the list of things I decided not to build.
Read more27 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agentic engineering
I self-hosted an agent platform on hardware I already own. The models were never the hard part. The hard part was the playbook: the exact combinations of engine, tools, and surface that turn one platform into a coder, a researcher, a QA gate, and a business analyst. Here are the five I actually run.
Read more27 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agent architecture
Grok isn't a model, it's an agent system: tools trained into the reasoning, real-time X and web search on xAI's infra, a four-agent cross-verifying architecture, long-running agents. I break down its features, architecture, and safety harness — then map each piece to a component I can build self-hosted on a subscription I already pay for.
Read more26 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agent tools
A 'bot' in an agent platform isn't a monolith. It's a small tool plus a persona that knows when to call it. Using my Grok image generator as the worked example: the tool-vs-MCP decision, the function schema that doubles as a prompt, the tool loop, and turning a tool into a bot.
Read more26 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agentic engineering
A one-line prompt tweak can silently break an agent, and you won't notice until a user does. My fix is an eval harness: a golden set of inputs and checks, run against every agent and workflow on every change. Here's the anatomy — deterministic checks, LLM-as-judge, run-on-change regression, and grading multi-agent workflows.
Read more25 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
agent architecture
I already run a self-hosted autonomous engineer. When I wanted Cursor's cloud agents too, I didn't pick one — I made the executor swappable. Here's the integration architecture that turns any hosted coding agent into a first-class engine behind my own surface, in four small pieces.
Read more21 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
agentic engineering
Devin costs $500/mo. Cursor's background agents live in someone else's cloud with your code. So I built the same capability on my own machines, on a Claude subscription I already pay for. Here is the full architecture -- the loop, the data model, the six-phase build, the hardening -- and why 70% of it was infrastructure I already had.
Read more05 May 2026 · 6 min read
agentic engineering
Forget vibe coding. This is a real workflow: plan with agents, verify with QA, review as human, ship to production. Here is what it actually looks like in practice.
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