Bigger context, worse agents
I've been experimenting with feeding agents larger volumes of context. The pattern is steady: the bigger I make it, the worse it looks. Meanwhile, the rest of the field is racing t...
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I built an AI to watch a bird. She left.
I built an AI to watch a Common Redstart nesting in my garden. Two weeks later she left the box and never came back. The AI didn't notice — and that was the lesson.
Mining Bitcoin in my hallway — and the home automation that decides when to do it
A 21energy Ofen 2 sits in my hallway — heating the air and hashing Bitcoin. This is the Home Assistant logic that decides when, why, and at what tier.
Cairn: a thin SDLC for solo Claude Code work
A workflow layer for solo Claude Code that sits on top of the externalized context architecture. Four slash commands, one knowledge file, and a session protocol that keeps discipli...
Paper rules break first
Two months of running the agent-team starter prompt taught me which rules actually hold. The ones wired into tooling survived. The ones that only lived in prose were the first to e...
The context wars: how Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok manage agent memory in 2026
I've spent months building context management patterns by hand. Here's how the four major platforms are solving the same problems at the infrastructure level — and what it means fo...
My .md files vs Claude's memory tool: a practitioner comparison
Anthropic shipped a memory tool that looks structurally identical to the markdown files I've been maintaining by hand. Here's what each approach gets right, where they diverge, and...
Custodians of context: how our roles must evolve in the AI era
I've been writing about context management at the individual and team level. This post zooms out: if context is the real bottleneck in AI, who owns it across an organization — and...
Separation of concerns in AI agent teams: lessons from multi-disciplinary delivery (and where they break)
We've been solving the 'too complex for one person' problem for decades in program delivery. Now some team members are language models — and the coordination overhead is measured i...
The recipe app I couldn't build six years ago
Six years ago I helped a CPG company dream up a smart meal planner. We never shipped it. This year, my wife and I built it — and we use it every week.