Field notes from an AI practitioner.
No sponsored content. No vendor takes. No LinkedIn-bait. Just what I'm building, what broke, and what I learned.
Your agent works. That's not the same as production-ready.
I've been in enough post-mortems to spot the pattern before it plays out. A team builds an agent. It handles the happy path well. The demo goes smoothly, the stakeholders nod, someone asks "when can w…
Prompt Caching Isn't a Setting. It's a Prompt Architecture Decision.
How prefix caching actually works, why most teams get the ordering wrong, and the exact restructuring that turns a cache-miss prompt into a cache-hit one.
RAG Isn't a Vector Database. It's a Retrieval Problem.
Every team building with RAG right now has roughly the same setup. Documents get chunked, chunks get embedded, embeddings go into a vector database, and at query time you run a similarity search, grab…
Neuro-Symbolic AI: When the LLM Doesn't Get the Final Say
Everyone's Using AI. Nobody's Measuring Whether It's Working.
Everyone has AI now.
Production AI Is an Engineering Discipline, Not a Demo
Over 25 years in enterprise tech, and more intensely in the last couple of years building AI products and advising teams on agentic systems, I've watched the same pattern repeat itself so many times t…
Your Agent Has More Access Than Your Junior Developer. That's a Problem.
I watched an agent bypass its container and write to the host filesystem.
Prompts Are Code. Treat Them Like It.
There's a pattern I keep seeing in teams building agentic systems. The architecture is solid. The agents work. The critic-falsifier loop catches real problems. Everything looks good in the demo.
Your Agent Broke at 2 AM. Now What?
In my last post, I talked about what makes a system genuinely agentic — the autonomous loop, the critic, the falsifier, the layered memory. If you haven't read it, start there. This post assumes you'v…
What "Agentic" Actually Means — Because Most Agents Aren't
I've spent the last year architecting agentic systems — real ones, in production, tied to actual business workflows. And the more I build, the more I realize how loosely this industry throws around th…