AI Tide Notes · Human-readable Systems
AI Engineering Journal
Notes, patterns, and practical experiments from building AI systems that remain understandable and useful to people.
Agentic Systems
Keel: The Leash for Agentic SDLC Management
2026-04-03
The model and the harness cover two-thirds of agentic engineering. The missing layer is the host: a CLI state machine that enforces shared physics for both humans and agents, creating structural trust that capability and coordination alone cannot.
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9 min readSystems Thinking
The 12-Slot Rule: Constraint-Driven Prioritization for Distributed Teams
2026-03-16
From cardiac refractory periods to diesel governors to analog watch faces, constraint is how reliable systems stay alive. Here is a low-resolution but concrete git-based pacemaker protocol that brings the same instinct to distributed teams.
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10 min readAgentic Systems
Unix Is the IDE, and It’s Back
2026-03-12
In the agentic era, Unix-style composability and text streams are not nostalgia, they are the real interface for reliable AI-enabled development.
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7 min readSearch
Sift: Local Hybrid Search Without the Infrastructure Tax
2026-03-10
sift is a daemonless, single-binary local search tool that runs a full BM25 + vector + reranking pipeline on demand — no indexing service, no cloud dependency, built for agents and developers who need fast, repeatable retrieval over real corpora.
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7 min readSystems Engineering
Building DuckDB Extensions with Zig and Nix
2024-03-03
This post is intended for Nix users and Zig developers who want practical guidance for building and shipping DuckDB extensions with a stable toolchain.
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14 min readLeadership
Building & Running Effective Software Development Teams
2022-02-14
Over my journey in software development, I’ve had the good fortune of exposure to many different team structures and project management philosophies. Some, more effective than others.
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8 min read