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.
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.
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.
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.
Cloud vs Mac Studio: the hybrid split, and why both
Customer-facing belongs in the cloud. Training, batch, and eval belong on the desk. Here's why running both costs less and works better.
Capturing the secret sauce: what actually trains the AI
Captured judgment is not a model and it's not a knowledge base. It's the small set of things the consultant has personally learned from being wrong.
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.
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.
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.
The Helix Experiment: what we'll learn and what could fail
What the experiment is asking, the failures already encountered, and the failure shapes still on the watch list.
DSPy + MCP: the combination I've been waiting for
DSPy optimizes the prompt-and-program layer. MCP standardizes the tool-and-data layer. Put them together and you have the primitives for maintainable agents, the stack I've been arguing for since the start of the year, finally usable.
AI in the news: week of May 10, 2026
Anthropic ships Claude Mythos Preview through Project Glasswing, thousands of zero-days across every major OS and browser, given only to defenders. The EU AI Omnibus deal lands May 7 with a hard ban on nudifiers. CAISI signs pre-release evals with Google, Microsoft, xAI. May layoff print is ugly.