Writing
War stories from production.
Twelve essays on what actually breaks when AI hits production, and what to do about it. New essays land every 2–4 weeks.
Where to start
Five essays for first-time readers. If you only read one, read the first one.
Everyone Wants AI to Remember. I Delete Its Memory Every Day.
Why I wipe my agents' memory every 24 hours. The Drift Tax.
I Let AI Generate My Training Data. It Poisoned Everything.
Six months of bad scores because AI-generated training data inflated everything.
I Was Paying a Brain Surgeon to Put On Band-Aids
70% cost savings when I stopped sending every request to Claude.
Why I Never Ship AI Output Without a Second Opinion
Why one AI checking another beats one AI alone.
The Boring Architecture Choice That Saved Everything
The 2:47 AM crash that ended the on-call pages.
All essays
Agent Architecture
Everyone Wants AI to Remember. I Delete Its Memory Every Day.
Memory makes AI agents confident. It also makes them quietly wrong. Here's why I wipe the slate clean every 24 hours.
What Breaks When You Let AI Run Without You
I've been running AI agents on autopilot since 2024. Here's every way they've broken — and what I wish someone had told me before I started.
The Boring Architecture Choice That Saved Everything
Everyone wants fancy AI orchestration. I use a checklist that won't let you skip steps. It's the least sexy decision I've made — and the most important.
Everyone Told Me to Use AI to Route My AI Calls. I Used a Spreadsheet.
I route tasks across four AI models. Everyone assumes I trained a fancy classifier to decide which model handles what. I didn't. Here's why that's the right call.
Data Trust
Why I Never Ship AI Output Without a Second Opinion
AI writes beautifully and lies confidently. So I built a system where a second AI checks every fact before anything goes out the door.
Your AI Is Probably Wrong and Doesn't Know It
Most AI systems can tell you their answer. Almost none can tell you how confident they should be. That's the difference between a tool and a toy.
I Let AI Generate My Training Data. It Poisoned Everything.
The data looked perfect. Passed every check. Took me months to realize it was systematically lying — and my system was getting worse because of it.
Cost & Operations
I Was Paying a Brain Surgeon to Put On Band-Aids
Most AI apps send every task to the most expensive model. That's like hiring a surgeon for a papercut. Here's how I fixed it — and cut costs by 70%.
The Bug That Took a Week to Find (Fixed by Changing One Number)
My AI was returning blank answers. No errors. No crashes. Just silence. It took me a week to figure out why. The fix was embarrassing.
My AI Agents Started Gossiping About Each Other
I let my AI agents share the same conversation to save time. They started mixing up each other's work. It took me a month to notice.
I Scored 671 Products to Find Out Why Things Go Viral. The Answer Was Humbling.
Turns out, having a great product barely matters. What actually predicts explosive growth is something most founders completely ignore.