Writing

Why things break, and what to do about it.

Plain-English essays on AI agents, running language models and distributed systems. Most include an interactive demo you can poke at. I post when I have something worth saying, so there’s no schedule.

  1. 17 Sept 2026108 min read

    Building Effective Autoresearch Systems: 2

    A system that runs its own experiments has about seventeen moving parts, and each one has a way of quietly lying to you. Here is every mechanism I found that stops it, in the order the loop runs them.Strong opinionAI agents, Evaluation, LLMs
  2. 16 Sept 202639 min read

    Building Effective Autoresearch Systems: 1

    Systems that run their own experiments, read their own results and keep the changes that worked. The ones that have discovered anything real share one thing, and it isn’t the search algorithm. It’s who marks the homework.Strong opinionAI agents, Evaluation, LLMs
  3. 14 Aug 202610 min read

    Your Agent Isn’t Confused. It’s Timing Out.

    Almost every failed agent run I’ve debugged came down to a timeout, a retry that did something twice, or context that got cut off without warning. The model was fine. The system around it wasn’t.Strong opinionAI agents, Reliability, LLMs
  4. 9 Aug 202622 min read

    Where the Money Goes When You Run an LLM

    These days, much of an LLM bill goes on words you never read: the model thinking out loud, charged by the word. Here’s where the money goes, why more thinking isn’t always better, and how to stop paying genius rates for easy questions.Strong opinionLLMs, AI agents, Cost
  5. 3 Aug 202614 min read

    22,580 GPT-2s Fit Inside Kimi K3. Scale Is the Boring Part.

    Seven years took language models from 124 million parameters to 2.8 trillion, and the block diagram barely moved. The interesting part is quieter: what a model keeps while it reads, what it throws away when it runs out of room, and who gets to decide.Strong opinionLLMs, Attention, Architecture
  6. 15 Dec 202540 min read

    How Subscription Billing Systems Actually Work

    A subscription isn’t a row with a boolean on it. It’s a long-running state machine that outlives every process and most of the services that touch it. Here’s how the real ones are built, and three problems that only show up once there are hundreds of millions of them.Battle-testedDistributed systems, Payments, Reliability
  7. 18 Jul 202512 min read

    Slow Database Writes? Blame the Map.

    Every consensus protocol has the same speed limit, a round trip to most of your servers. So the real engineering happens in where you put those servers and what you’re willing to call a failure.Battle-testedDistributed systems, Consensus, Latency
  8. 2 May 202510 min read

    Too Much Traffic? Decide Who Waits.

    Every queue in your system is a decision about who waits when things get busy. Most outages I’ve read about happened because nobody made that decision on purpose.Battle-testedDistributed systems, Reliability