Engineering notes on AI, ML, custom apps, and the messy bits of shipping production software.
AI agents are real, useful, and easy to oversell. Here is a plain-English look at what they do well today, where they still need a human, and how to start.
A practical, ordered playbook for lowering production LLM costs. Prompt hygiene, caching, model routing, retrieval, budgets, and the measurement that ties it all together.
A straight, vendor-neutral answer to the question every founder is asking right now. Most teams do not need custom AI yet. Here is how to tell when you do.
A practical, vendor-neutral guide to building an AI assistant grounded in your own handbook, policies, and support history, plus the failure modes to avoid.
Hype-free engineering principles for AI products that serve users, not nudge them. Grounding, refusal, evals, cost-bounding, the boring decisions that actually ship.
A practical AI development guide, when retrieval-augmented generation beats fine-tuning, when prompt engineering wins, and the cost equation most teams skip.
What you can realistically ship in a 4-week custom app MVP, features, tradeoffs, and the timeline traps that kill startups.
A working model is not a working product. The full production ML stack, data pipelines, deployment patterns, monitoring, drift detection.