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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AI in the news: week of May 3, 2026
Big Tech Q1 prints AI as the lead growth engine, Microsoft Agent 365 hits GA as a paid control plane, GPT-5.5 carries momentum into enterprise rollouts, EU AI Act trilogue stumbles, and Challenger calls AI 26% of April's cuts. Capital is flowing into compute, not labor.
Suspending, retiring, and delegating personas
Personas get hired, suspended, delegated, and retired. The same lifecycle you already use for employees. That isn't a metaphor, that's the playbook.
Households and businesses are just bigger persona graphs
A household, a small business, and an enterprise are the same shape. Personas plus projects plus shared overlaps. Only the fan-out changes.