• Deploying Hermes Agent With Ansible Without Creating a Snowflake

  I have a home server with Plenty of RAM and no useful GPU, so running a local model was never the interesting part of deploying Hermes Agent. The interesting part was making the agent setup repeatable. I could have pasted a docker run …

• pnpm 11 Made the Safe Thing the Default

  Protecting against supply chain attacks requires vigilance. You have to audit your dependencies. You have to pin your versions. You have to review your install scripts. All of these are great things to do, but they require sustained effort. …

• Onboarding a Second Engineer to an Agent-Heavy Repo

  How do you onboard a new engineer to a project when most of what they need to know is not checked into the code at all? It’s the agent configuration. It’s the rules about commands, the conventions the agent applies automatically because …

• Boring Is a Feature

  What does boring look like in the age of AI? And I’m not talking about uninteresting. I’m talking about highly maintainable. JavaScript? I mean I guess models are good at it. Everybody knows it. It runs everywhere. The biggest problem with …

• 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 …