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 3, 2026
A cheap model can do 90% of the work
The default move is to point the biggest, smartest model at everything. It works in the demo and quietly bankrupts you at scale — because most of what an agent does isn't reasoning, it's mechanical, and you're paying genius wages to read a form. The fix is boring and worth ~90%: let a smart model plan, and cheap models do. Here's the economics, and the one architectural rule that makes it possible.
- agents
- architecture
- business
June 3, 2026
Grounding isn't a feature. It's a constraint.
An LLM is a guesser by design — it will always make things up, and you can't prompt that away. The only reliable fix is architectural: put a deterministic source in charge of the facts and demote the model to a rephraser that may never author one. 'Add RAG' isn't that. Here's the difference, and why it's the line between an AI that sounds confident and one you can trust.
- architecture
- agents
- methodology
June 3, 2026
One agent that does everything does nothing well
When an agent isn't good enough, the instinct is to give it more — another tool, more instructions, more context. That makes it worse, and it's measured, not a matter of taste. The fix is the oldest rule in engineering: Single Responsibility. One agent, one job, a few tools, a short context. A god-agent is a ten-thousand-line function in a trench coat — and it fails for the same reason.
- agents
- architecture
- methodology
June 3, 2026
Orchestration is the architecture now
Split the god-agent into ten focused ones and you trade a model problem for a systems problem: now they have to work together, and coordination is harder than any single agent. Most teams treat that wiring as plumbing. It isn't — it's the architecture, it's a distributed system, and it fails like one. Here's what orchestration actually is, how it breaks, and why you shouldn't reach for it until you can name the bottleneck.
- agents
- architecture
- methodology
June 2, 2026
Cheap code is the most expensive code
The cost of changing software isn't constant — it follows a curve, and the shape of that curve is set by your architecture. Skipping SOLID, DRY, KISS, and DI doesn't save money; it moves the bill to later, with interest. Here's the economics, with the numbers.
- architecture
- methodology
- business