Notes
Short pieces about the methodology and architecture decisions behind the AI systems I ship — specs, evals, multi-agent orchestration, LLM integration, and the discipline of directing coding agents.
June 19, 2026
The agent came for the back office
Ramp just raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation — up from $32 billion seven months earlier — on the bet that AI agents automate corporate finance: expense reports, invoices, bookkeeping, even initiating payments. The flashy AI demos get the attention, but the ROI that's actually landing is unglamorous back-office work. Follow the boring money — and notice what makes it safe.
- business
- agents
June 19, 2026
The bottleneck moved to the power grid
OpenAI lined up 10 gigawatts with NVIDIA and 6 more with AMD; a Stargate data center just got 1.4 gigawatts approved in Michigan over furious local objections. The constraint on AI stopped being the model a while ago. It's electricity, land, and the politics around them. That reframes what efficiency is worth — and it's the same lesson that governs systems much smaller than a data center.
- architecture
- ai-native
June 19, 2026
The code that writes the code
Anthropic now says more than 80% of the code merged into its own systems is written by Claude — up from low single digits before 2025. And this month it published a serious report on recursive self-improvement: AI helping build the next AI. Strip out the sci-fi and there's a practical message for the rest of us about where the bottleneck is going, and what discipline it demands.
- agents
- methodology
June 19, 2026
The government red-teams the model now
The US AI standards body signed deals with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI to evaluate their frontier models before public release — and has already run more than 40 assessments, some of models the public never saw. The UK signed parallel agreements. Strip away the politics and there's a clear signal: evaluation, not vibes, is how anyone actually knows what a model can do. Steal the pattern.
- security
- methodology
June 19, 2026
Your model has a six-week shelf life
In a single two-week window this month the industry shipped Claude Mythos 5, GPT-5.6, Gemini 3.2, and a wall of Chinese frontier models — Qwen 3.7, DeepSeek V4.1, GLM-6 and more. New frontier models now land on a roughly six-week metronome. If your product's edge is 'we use the best model,' your edge expires before the quarter does. Here's how to build for a moving target.
- ai-native
- architecture
June 19, 2026
The AI speedup comes with a security bill
Gartner says 90% of engineering leaders report gains from AI coding tools — a net 19% productivity bump. The same research says unreviewed AI code has 23% higher bug density, and 14.3% of AI-generated snippets carry security vulnerabilities versus 9.1% for human-written. Almost nobody prints those two numbers in the same sentence. You should, because they're the same story.
- security
- methodology