Practitioner-level posts on AI infrastructure, agentic ops, retrieval, evals, cloud, and the older tech that shaped how we think about all of it. Published on Cookies Cookie Settings Echoes of the Machine. A curated entry-point index below.
AI Infrastructure & Agentic Systems
RAG, evals, prompts-as-code, the autonomy ladder, the AWS-native shape. The work behind the AI infrastructure practice.
Test sets, golden examples, regression detection. How you find out the AI broke before a customer does.
AI · May 2026The promotion from execute-with-confirmation to bounded autonomy is the steepest cliff in the autonomy ladder.
AI · May 2026Git, CI, feature flags. The discipline the most-edited surface in an AI product needs.
AI · May 2026Different cost profiles, different SLAs. How to think about an AI product as a system, not a model call.
AI · May 2026Embeddings, chunking, hybrid search, the prompt template that pulls in the right context.
Cloud · May 2026API Gateway, Lambda, Cognito, RDS+pgvector, Bedrock, S3, EventBridge, SQS, CloudFront, CloudWatch.
Cloud & Infrastructure
Data layer, auth, multi-tenancy, the cloud/local hybrid split. The work behind the cloud practice.
One Postgres for both your relational data and your embeddings. The MVP-grade data layer that doesn't need a forklift later.
Cloud · May 2026The cheapest day-one decision is also the most expensive one to defer.
Cloud · May 2026Customer-facing belongs in the cloud. Training, batch, and eval belong on the desk. Why running both costs less and works better.
Personal AI & Local-First
Apple Silicon, Ollama, mflux, the Mac Studio side of the hybrid stack. The math on why it pays for itself.
mflux, ollama/mlx-lm, fine-tuning, whisper, a batch runner. The math on why it pays for itself in months.
Topic · Personal AIThe full archive of local-first AI writing: workstation builds, model choices, and the practical-vs-cloud tradeoffs.
Topic · AutomationOlder and newer automation work: IaC patterns, agentic ops, and the operational glue underneath both.
Looking Back
Echoes of the Machine spends a lot of time on the older work (VMware, vRA, NSX, OneFuse, the 386 era) because the patterns hold. The names change. The shape doesn't.
Christmas 1991, ninth grade. Three decades on, the instincts that machine drilled in are the ones I'm reaching for again.
Topic · vRAThe archive from the vRA era: patterns, lessons, and the tooling that shaped how we think about IaC today.
Topic · Looking BackThe full archive of writing on older tech: what it taught us, what still applies, what was always wrong.
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