Essays & reflections
A working collection of ideas.
On building intelligent systems, making sense of them, and deciding what’s worth doing.
Engineering AI systems
10 essays · newest firstReliability, feedback, orchestration, and the architecture of agents.
The Regulator's Mirror
Metacognition as a governing layer: how an agent might monitor and regulate its own operation.
Intelligence Beyond the Next Token
The useful structure inside a model can be richer than the output channel through which we ask it to speak.
The Agent, Not the Task
A case for designing persistent, bounded, adaptive agents rather than organising everything around a task and a score.
Creating Reliable Systems from Unreliable Parts
A long-running engineering lesson: reliability is achieved through the arrangement of imperfect components.
Bounds, Not Goals
Designing agents around viable operating boundaries, feedback, and the friction that makes judgment possible.
The Protocol Prison
The interfaces that made software usable can become constraints on what intelligent systems are able to do.
The Reasoning Gap: A Technical Analysis
A longer treatment of hybrid systems, external verification, and the architecture behind effective AI tools.
Technical versionThe Reasoning Gap
The systems that work combine neural proposals with something that can check them. Reasoning becomes an architectural property.
From For-Loops to Colonies
How agentic coding grows from a persistent loop into coordinated systems, and what that asks of their human designers.
Feedback Is Substrate
Feedback is the material of AI engineering: an ongoing practice of observation, correction, and cultivation.