Writing

First-principles notes on agent systems and AI for traditional businesses. New posts land here without a redesign.

• Jul 2026

  Loops need brakes: five Trellis release candidates in five weeks

  Everyone spent this summer telling you to stop prompting and start designing loops. I agree, and I got there backwards. The brakes came first, then the map, then the gate, then a second engine.

• Jun 2026

  Trellis 1.0-rc: making the process enforce itself

  The last gap was not a missing rule. It was no guarantee the rules ran the same way in every harness, on every layer, on every project. Here is how I closed it.

• May 2026

  Renaming six projects on the same day

  A retro on the 2026-04-24 mass rename — directories, GitHub repos, hook configs, scheduled-audit paths — and the registry-first pattern that made the rest tractable.

• May 2026

  Native git hooks for projects without a Node runtime

  When husky is the wrong tool — wiring pre-commit, commit-msg, and pre-push enforcement into a Unity game and a Go-first monorepo without inventing a package.json just to install lint-staged.

• May 2026

  Stack profiles: where the engineering process bends without breaking

  How Lume (Unity) and ClusterBid (polyglot Go+TS+Python) each forced a new stack-profile carve-out — and what that taught me about the Rule of Three.

• May 2026

  Folding Anthropic's large-codebase playbook into Trellis

  A point-by-point gap analysis against the latest Claude Code best-practices guide, and the ten changes I shipped to close the gaps.

• May 2026

  Trellis: An Engineering Process for AI Coding Agents

  How I run six projects with one rulebook, nine hooks, and a fleet of weekly audits — and why I open-sourced it.

• Apr 2026

  Building this portfolio

  Why the site ships with the same process I'd bring to a client engagement — PRD, ADRs, ROADMAP, process-gate, agent-readiness, the whole thing in the open.

• Apr 2026

  What I learned building micrograd and makemore from scratch

  A foundations-first reading of Karpathy's Zero to Hero — why re-implementing the thing is the only way to understand the thing.

• Mar 2026

  Notes on bringing AI to an MSME

  WhatsApp, paper ledgers, Tally, and a few spreadsheets. What actually moves the needle, and what doesn't.

• Feb 2026

  Migrating from Fastembed ONNX to Hugging Face TEI

  The specific trade-offs, the retrieval quality delta on an institutional corpus, and why the infra complexity was worth it.