Building Personal Harnesses
Small experiments with model choice, memory and retrieval give me better questions before committing to an agent project.
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Technology
What the repair robots remembered
What a robot repair-shop experiment revealed about agent memory, completed work, model choice, and the cost of fewer tool calls.
Read essayThe 80/20 Inversion
How AI projects shift effort from the initial build toward evals, experiments, and learning from real users.
Read essayA story of two patches
A roof repair and a WordPress migration prompt a reflection on AI agents, rebuilding software, and the trade-off between experience and dependency.
Read essayThis Is Fine
AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery and exploitation while exposing the accumulated fragility of software and the ambiguity of agent authorization.
Read essayThe Lego Model: How Tool Calling Changes the Way We Build AI Applications
"What should I read next?" seems like a simple question. But answering it well requires knowing what the user is currently reading, what they've finished
Read essayGoogle, Microsoft and the Search Wars
A demo cost Google's shareholders $100bn dollars last week. Why?
Read essayBen Thomson’s “4 Horsemen of the Tech Recession”
In the last month, we have had huge layoffs across technology, yet the "real economy" seems robust. What is going on?
Read essayBig Tech’s Layoffs, AI, and the Closing of the Productivity Gap
Big Tech has let go of thousands of workers in the last couple of months. In addition to the end of the era of cheap money and a broader economic slowdown,
Read essayThe Limits of Generative AI
AI is having a moment. The emergence of Generative AI models showcased by ChatGPT, DALL-E, and others has caused much excitement and angst.
Read essayMachine Learning and its consequences
Machine Learning has brought huge benefits in many domains and generated hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. However, the second-order consequences of
Read essayCrypto and Transaction Costs
You live in the up-and-coming suburb of Cryptoville and you want to buy a house. It costs $1m.
Read essayElon Musk & The Twitter Algorithm
I have been trying to avoid the whole Elon Musk / Twitter drama, but it has been challenging. I am ambivalent about whether Mr. Musk's takeover of Twitter is
Read essayBetween Rock and a.. podcast?
Just because you can do it doesn't make it a great business model. Take music streaming, for example.
Read essayOn crypto outages
What to do when your decentralized, scalable, performant blockchain turns out to be not so scalable, sort-of-centralized and not so performant?
Read essayOn Roblox’s Outage
Roblox is one of the world's biggest game platforms. With over fifty million daily users, it is a wildly popular platform to build and play games.
Read essayOn Forgiveness in UX Design
As engineers and designers, we need to focus on building products that have empathy and forgiveness for their users.
Read essayDigital Transformation
Benedict Evans, as usual, provides an insightful view of the "Digital Transformation" story. While crypto, machine learning, NFTs, and drones may generate the
Read essayOn Modern Web Development
Tom MacWright wrote a much discussed article on the state of modern web development a couple of weeks ago.
Read essayBioWare & Anthem: A Cautionary Tale
I love playing video games. My favourite game series is called Mass Effectmade by a game studio called BioWare.
Read essay4 Waves of AI – And why they matter
I can’t open a newspaper or visit my friendly local bookstore without coming across a think piece about why AI is a *BIG DEAL* and how it changes everything.
Read essayDo you know your dependencies?
A contributor on GitHub finds an abandoned, but popular JS library and commits code that targets a Bitcoin wallet made by a particular company. Hundreds of
Read essay13 years of mistakes and what I learnt from them..
In 2004, I graduated from University with a degree in Computer Science and a graduate job at a large investment bank. In the years since, I have worked as a
Read essayReview: The Docker Book by James Turnbull
It is hard to avoid Docker. Hacker News has been abuzz with it for years, The Register ran an exhaustive feature about it a couple of months ago; indeed it
Read essayReview: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim et. al
The "Phoenix Project.." is a parable about technology, business and an introduction to the hot new buzzword of the day - "DevOps". We follow Bill as he is
Read essayThe WhatsApp acquisition
The water-cooler was abuzz this morning with news of Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a tiny company. With the claimed 400 million users that
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