Writing on AI systems and tools

Essays on AI agents, context engineering, local-first software, developer tools, memory systems, and applied research.

Cover image for “The second brain needs a schema”

AI

The second brain needs a schema

Google's Open Knowledge Format names a lesson I learned when multiple agents began writing to the same repo. Portable files are not enough. A second brain compounds only when every writer shares a schema.

July 11, 2026

Cover image for “The agent native home”

Agents

The agent native home

I reset my Mac and rebuilt my agent-native development environment from zero. What survived is small. A git repo, one memo every agent reads at session start, and a discipline about context. Less context, but the right context. This is the full architecture, from the shared AGENTS.md and the symlinks that make Claude Code and Codex read the same file to the MCP registry and the knowledge protocol that keeps the memo under a hundred lines.

July 5, 2026

Cover image for “Vaulted - secrets your agent never sees”

Security

Vaulted - secrets your agent never sees

Vaulted is a local-first .env and secrets manager that keeps ciphertext on your machine and injects plaintext into your app through one hardened Rust path. It is MCP-native, so a coding agent can run your code with real secrets without the values ever entering its context window. This is the full build: the key hierarchy, the single execution path, the FFI bridge, the redaction engine, and the tests that make the guarantees structural.

July 3, 2026

Cover image for “Elliptic - Jira for your agents”

AI

Elliptic - Jira for your agents

For thirty years a project tracker was a thing a person kept in sync by hand. That busywork is your agents' job now, and they need a durable environment to do it in, not a chat window that forgets. Elliptic is that environment, multi-tenant, audited, live, over a built-in MCP server, on your own keys. It is also the thing you share. One invitation and a new teammate or a new agent inherits the entire living project, the tasks, the roadmap, and the full history, with nothing to explain and nothing to transfer. You do not fill it in. You check the progress. Here is how it works.

June 28, 2026

Cover image for “Folio - who said what”

AI

Folio - who said what

Folio is a meeting recorder for macOS that runs Whisper and pyannote on-device, labels every speaker, and writes Markdown to your vault. No cloud, no telemetry, no audio leaving your Mac. Here is how the transcription and diarization pipelines actually work.

June 9, 2026

Cover image for “The 95% failure rate is not about the models”

AI

The 95% failure rate is not about the models

5% of enterprise AI projects deliver value. The number has not moved through three generations of frontier models. The operational layer is the moat, and context engineering is the discipline that builds it.

May 17, 2026

Cover image for “I cloned my advisory board”

AI

I cloned my advisory board

meclis. Three named thinkers arguing in your browser. The consulting bundle, unbundled.

May 9, 2026

Cover image for “The next sessions”

AI

The next sessions

Why AI memory is a compounding problem, not a retrieval problem. Files beat databases.

April 24, 2026

Cover image for “Ears without eyes”

AI

Ears without eyes

An agent watching video should default to listening, and only open its eyes when audio admits it missed something.

April 20, 2026

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