• The Best Automation Has a Manual Escape Hatch

  Automation earns trust by being easy to override, not by being impossible to question. That sounds backwards. The pitch for automating something is usually that it removes the human, and a system you keep reaching into feels like a system …

• Cost and Latency Belong in the Score

  Congratulations, the best model available passed your eval. That’s not the question you should be answering. What other models could have achieved equivalent results? How much did it cost to run those other models? How long did it take for …

• Your Vibes Are Not an Agent Eval

  Do you really know what you’re doing? You swapped a model, you tuned an agentic workflow, you had the agent rewrite a chunk of a system prompt. You added a skill. Now the output feels sharper. Is that feeling a measurement? No, it’s an …

• Start With Ten Tasks You Actually Do

  Public benchmarks of large language models are a fine way to compare models in the abstract, but they’re close to useless for answering questions about things that actually matter. Generally, it’s helpful to know which model is the best in …

• `updated_at` Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Strategy

  In the last post we talked about the problems with a distributed system, and touched on the fact that timestamps are not as reliable as you think they are. If you have two updated_at fields and you compare them, how do you decide which side …

• The Moment You Add Sync, You Have a Distributed System

  How do you keep two sets of data in sync? Like, by definition, you now have a distributed system. It could be something simple, syncing files or talking with a remote service somewhere. Maybe it’s not a lot of code. Initially, it might not …

• Your Local File Should Not Have to Argue With Your Database

  Sync bugs usually all start the same way. Two copies of something, both of them mostly right, and no written rule about which one wins. The problems occur when you don’t notice The bug. When the file says one thing and the database says …

• The Decision Log: A Lightweight Artifact for Agentic Coding

  Coding agents are remarkably good at reopening decisions you already made. Imagine a content pipeline where posts live as local Markdown files and a database holds the scheduling metadata. You open a fresh session. Which one does the agent …

• Run Your Whole Agent Stack on a $5 Box

  I SSH’d into my home server this afternoon and ran docker stats on the memory layer that every one of my coding agent sessions talks to. Here’s what came back: mem0-qdrant 28.09MiB / 60.75GiB 2.13% mem0-neo4j 612.7MiB / 60.75GiB 0.77% 640 …

• If I Worked at Apple Again, I'd Build iApps

  I worked as a contractor at Apple more than a decade ago. The specific work doesn’t matter, but if I walked back through the doors today, I know what I’d pitch. Call them iApps, just as a thought experiment. An iApp would be a small …