We write to
think clearly.
Critical thinking on agent design, system failures,
decision discipline, and building with AI without losing control.
The Case for Deterministic AI Agents
Open-ended chat threads are the wrong primitive for production software. We argue for explicit constraints, observable logic, and artifacts you own — not conversations you forget.
Why Most AI Startups Will Fail by 2027
The hidden compounding debt of unconstrained code generation. When execution is cheap and reasoning is absent, systems fail silently — then catastrophically.
The Artifact-First Workflow
How we use architecture documents to control agent behavior. The agent is a means of production. The artifact is the asset. Here is how we design for what remains.
Bounded Systems Beat Open-Ended Builds
Scope is not a constraint. It is the design. Why explicit edges make AI systems reliable, predictable, and ownable — and how we encode them from day one.
Observability in Agent-First Architectures
You cannot debug what you cannot see. Field observations on why traditional monitoring fails for AI agents and what to build instead.
Shipping the Shopify Control Plane
A behind-the-scenes look at how we designed, constrained, and deployed a bounded AI intervention for Shopify merchants — in 10 days, with zero ambiguity.
Intent and Execution Are Separate Problems
What you want to happen and how it happens are fundamentally different engineering problems. Conflating them is where systems fail silently.
The Kill Switch Is a Feature
Agents that escalate are more valuable than agents that decide. Why irreversible authority must always remain human — and the patterns we use to enforce it.
Building Praxiom: Decision Intelligence from Scratch
How we built a system that captures product reasoning — not just what you decided, but why, what you assumed, and when to revisit. Institutional memory that grows.
Dispatches on
controlled systems.
Deep dives into the engineering of AI systems. Delivered whenever we have something important to say. No noise. No schedule. Just signal.
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