IDEAS, DECISIONS & LESSONS

Journal

Notes on AI, architecture and building useful products.

878 articles

21 Feb 2026 · 6 min read

The AI Product Owner & PM: Backlog, Planning & Stakeholder Alignment in the AI Era (Part 3 of 12)

Part 3 of 12 — How AI transforms the PO and PM roles: AI-assisted backlog scoring, sprint planning, status reporting, risk flagging, release note generation, and stakeholder communication — and the human judgment that keeps it grounded.

20 Feb 2026 · 29 min read

gemini-live

Building a Production Voice AI Interview Agent: S2S-Only with Dynamic Prompts

A practical build guide for a speech-to-speech interview agent using LiveKit MultimodalAgent, OpenAI Realtime, and Gemini Live. Dynamic system prompts, 3 personas, function calling, and provider switching — no cascaded pipeline needed.

20 Feb 2026 · 29 min read

architecture

EF Core 10, Minimal APIs, and the Outer Layers Nobody Gets Right

Part 4 of 7 — Implementing Infrastructure with EF Core 10 (pgvector, JSON columns), AI service integrations, Minimal APIs with Route Groups, authentication, and wiring it all together in Program.cs.

20 Feb 2026 · 12 min read

I Connected 12 MCP Servers to Claude Code — Here's Which Ones Actually Matter

Part 3 of 5 — What MCP is, how to configure servers in .mcp.json, the top servers by category (GitHub, Playwright, databases, search, design, cloud), performance pitfalls, and why you should limit yourself to 2-3 per project.

20 Feb 2026 · 11 min read

The Voice AI Interview Playbook: Cascaded vs. Speech-to-Speech — Choosing Your Pipeline Architecture (Part 2 of 12)

Part 2 of 12 — The cascaded STT→LLM→TTS pipeline gives you control. Speech-to-speech models give you speed. Here's how to choose — and why the best systems use both.

20 Feb 2026 · 6 min read

The AI Business Analyst: Requirements, Discovery & User Stories in the AI Era (Part 2 of 12)

Part 2 of 12 — How AI agents transform the BA role: from manual interview synthesis to structured requirements in hours, AI-assisted user story generation, acceptance criteria validation, and the human skills that stay irreplaceable.

20 Feb 2026 · 35 min read

edtech

Building KidSpark: Product Design and Feature Prioritization for Kids Ed-Tech (Part 2 of 10)

Part 2 of 10 — Toan had a 47-feature wishlist. Shipping half of them would have killed KidSpark before launch. Here's how we found the features that actually mattered.

19 Feb 2026 · 10 min read

The Voice AI Interview Playbook: Why Real-Time Voice Changes Everything (Part 1 of 12)

Part 1 of 12 — The landscape of real-time voice AI has shifted. Gemini Live, OpenAI Realtime, Bedrock Nova Sonic, and Grok make sub-500ms AI conversations possible. Here's the reference architecture for building a production voice interview platform.

19 Feb 2026 · 8 min read

leadership

The Tech Lead's Playbook for AI-Era Quality Engineering

A practical strategy for choosing what to test first, production monitoring with Checkly, knowledge base accuracy tracking, team adoption, and building a quality culture when your app uses AI. Part 4 of the series.