Thoughts & Essays
Technical deep-dives, architectural notes, and perspectives on applied AI engineering and systems design.
The Person Let Loose in the City: A Better Mental Model for Prompting LLMs
Almost everyone who works with large language models has felt this: you ask for something simple, and what comes back is fluent, well-formed, and slightly be...
Think Backward, Build Forward: A Practical Framework for Designing AI-Powered Solutions
A common way to design an AI solution is to start with the technology. “We need an AI agent.” “Let’s use RAG.” “Which model should we use?” The p...
Sovereign architect part 2: From Philosophy to Protocol
Part 2 of 2 — The Sovereign Architect Part 1 laid out what I believe: engineering is applied philosophy, and the job is to survive human irrationality, se...
Sovereign architect part 1: Engineering Is Applied Philosophy
Part 1 of 2 — The Sovereign Architect "Engineering is applied philosophy. We solve human realities under irrationality, selfishness, and chaos: not just s...
Your Model Isn't a Product Until It's an API: Why AI Engineers Need Backend Skills
A finetuned model sitting in a Jupyter notebook has done nothing for anyone yet. It has no users, no uptime, no way to be called by another system. The momen...
We Cannot Win the Frontier AI Race: Here Is the Race Africa Can Win
In short: Building a frontier AI model to rival GPT, Gemini, or Claude costs hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in compute alone, plus energy infras...