Scaling Out
When a system runs out of headroom, you've got two options: buy a bigger box, or run more boxes. We settled that question for the whole internet a long time ago; the web runs on adding cheap machines,…
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The Gas-Powered Wagon
Bolting AI onto an organization built for walking pace doesn't make it faster. The bottleneck was never the typing — it was coordination, and AI only shone a light on it.
There's a genre of AI blog post that I skip as soon as I recognize it: the company retrospective where they handed everyone Copilot or Claude Code, waited a couple of quarters, and came away disappoin…
The agent cannot guard itself
Why coding agents need a sandbox the agent cannot reach, an audit log the agent cannot write, and signed instructions the agent cannot rewrite.
Every coding-agent sandbox I've set up ends in the same tired loop. I lock it down, the agent stops being useful, I loosen it, and I end up exactly where I started: YOLO mode. At best there is a sandb…
I Am Still Here
Trans Day of Visibility, 2026 Being myself is apparently political now. I'm a trans woman. I'm a Staff SRE, an open-source contributor, a KubeCon speaker, a community organizer, a homesteader, a neigh…
Incubator: A team of Claude agents that takes an idea from research to release
I have a side project graveyard. You probably do too. The pattern is always the same: idea hits at 11pm, I start building immediately, skip the "does anyone actually want this" step, burn a weekend, a…
lfg – WoW raid frames for AI agents on a $25 LED
I run up to ten AI coding agents at a time. I wanted to see what they were all doing. So obviously I built a WoW raid frame on a $25 LED panel. Each agent gets an 8x8 sprite. When it's working, you s…
Context is Everything (Conditions May Vary)
Large language models are trained on massive amounts of text. During training, the model learns patterns and stores them as weights. Not rules, not lookup tables. Weights: billions of numerical relati…
Get Closer So I Can Hear the Birds
I was at a friend's apartment, testing GPT-4o's voice mode. She had lovebirds, and they were chirping away. "Can you hear the birds?" I asked. "Yes, I can hear them," GPT said. This surprised me. I'd …
The Socially Constructed Agent
Last week, Claude Code was about to open a PR for a feature I never asked for. Not a slightly-wrong implementation. A completely different feature. I'd just spent an hour planning the task with my nav…
The Navigator Pattern
I've been using Navigators for my platform engineering work and they've completely changed how I interact with AI. Keeping track of work, planning implementations, and learning over time and across pr…