Architecture
When the GPU Vendor Owns the Model Hub
If the company that sells the chips also owns the default place engineers pull open models, pinning, licensing, and exit plans stop being theoretical.
#ai#open-source#infrastructure#vendors
Engineering Notes
Al's Engineering Notes
Review, mentoring, runbooks, and how engineering work actually gets done.
Software Engineering · 5 published · 10 in the review queue. Written by Al Beltran.
WorkflowYour Agent Is Missing the Monitoring Layer the Labs Shipped
Frontier models are being wrapped in eval gates and misalignment monitors. Most product agents still log prompts and hope. That gap is now the production problem.
#ai#agents#observability#reliability
WorkflowWhy Most RAG Demos Die in Production
Retrieval-augmented generation looks finished in a notebook. In production it is a search problem, a freshness problem, and an evaluation problem wearing a chat UI.
#ai#rag#search#evaluation
WorkflowPlatform Engineering Is Not a Portal
A golden path is paved workflows, paved defaults, and a team that owns the pavement. A catalog of links with a search bar is a bookmark manager.
#platform#devops#developer-experience#delivery
WorkflowAI-Augmented Engineering Without Outsourcing Judgment
How Claude and Cursor can compress design, coding, and review cycles while keeping architecture and production decisions human-owned.
#ai#cursor#claude#productivity#engineering
Review queue
Planned notes stay unpublished until they are written and reviewed. Titles are listed so the topic map is complete. They are not pages.
How I Review a Pull Request
Correctness, contracts, and operability — in that order. Style last.
informational · intermediate · high priority
Writing System Design Docs People Actually Read
Context, decision, consequences. Keep the sequence diagram for the part that is not obvious.
educational · intermediate · medium priority
When to Stop Abstracting
The third copy might want a function. The first copy wanted to ship.
informational · intermediate · medium priority
Debugging Production Without Guessing
Reproduce the signal, narrow the blast radius, change one thing.
problem-solving · intermediate · medium priority
Mentoring Without Taking the Keyboard
Ask for the plan. Review the diff. Do not become the only person who can ship.
informational · senior · medium priority
Estimating Under Uncertainty
Ranges, risks, and the unknown you write down so it does not become a silent week.
educational · intermediate · medium priority
Saying No to a Rewrite (Most of the Time)
Strangle a seam. Rewrites need a reason that survives contact with the calendar.
informational · senior · medium priority
On-Call That Does Not Burn People
Pages that mean user pain. Runbooks that work at 2 a.m. Handoffs that are written.
informational · intermediate · medium priority
What I Put in a Runbook
Symptoms, checks, actions, escalate. No novel. No "restart it" without a why.
educational · intermediate · medium priority
Building in Public Without Leaking Secrets
Share the pattern, not the customer. No tokens, no internal hostnames, no screenshots of prod.
informational · intermediate · medium priority