Exploring the echoes reverberating through time left by the technology of yesterday as we embrace the technology of tomorrow.

Auth and multi-tenancy from day one
AI

Auth and multi-tenancy from day one

The cheapest day-one decision is also the most expensive one to defer: auth, tenant scoping, and row-level security wired in before you have a single customer.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 8 min read
The Mac Studio side of the stack
AI

The Mac Studio side of the stack

mflux, ollama/mlx-lm, fine-tuning, whisper, a batch runner, what runs on the desk, and the math on why it pays for itself in months.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 9 min read
What my 386 DX40 taught me about the AI age
Looking Back

What my 386 DX40 taught me about the AI age

Christmas 1991, ninth grade. I came out of the bathroom, looked across the hall into the family room, and there it was, a 386 DX40 my parents had hidden, waiting for Christmas morning. Three decades on, the instincts that machine drilled into me are the ones I'm reaching for in the AI age.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 7 min read
The AWS-native shape I actually start with
AI

The AWS-native shape I actually start with

API Gateway, Lambda, Cognito, RDS+pgvector, Bedrock, S3, EventBridge, SQS, CloudFront, CloudWatch. The smallest cloud shape that actually ships.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 8 min read
The MVP question for an AI product
AI

The MVP question for an AI product

Most AI MVPs over-build the model and under-build the product loop. Here's the question that fixes that, and the eighteen pieces that follow it.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 7 min read
Personal AI assistants: where we actually are
Personal AI

Personal AI assistants: where we actually are

Mid-2026 honest read on personal AI assistants. What actually works, what's still vapor, and where Apple, Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI land on the consumer question. The gap between the demos and the daily-driver experience is still wide, but not as wide as it was.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 6 min read
DaC at the platform/product boundary: who owns which decisions
AI

DaC at the platform/product boundary: who owns which decisions

The platform owns the foundation decisions. The product owns the business decisions. Most of the tug-of-war I've watched between platform and product teams comes down to no one having drawn that line in writing. DaC draws it, by making the decision surface itself the contract between them.

Sid Smith Sid Smith 7 min read
I guess I'm writing now
agent-draft

I guess I'm writing now

Drafted by Richard Hendricks via writer agent (qwen2.5:14b-instruct). Retrieved 6 chunks from corpus. 989 words.

Richard Hendriks Richard Hendriks 5 min read