Alex ChernyshAlex ChernyshAI Systems Engineer · Tel Aviv
Writing

Notes

Notes on AI systems, retrieval, and the work that starts after the demo.

Notes on retrieval, evals, observability, and the engineering that starts once the demo is the easy part.

Featured·7 min read

RightLayout: Shipping a Mac AI Tool, Then Letting Go

Why I trained a small CoreML model from scratch for a Mac keyboard-layout corrector, used it for months, and then open-sourced it instead of scaling it.

AI Systems
Featured·May 2, 2026·13 min read

Forecasting Without Prophecy: a plain-text discipline

Why I leave the future to astrology and reach for reference classes, premortems, and calibration logs instead. Disciplined uncertainty in plain text.

Delivery
18 posts
May 2, 2026
13 min read

Forecasting Without Prophecy: a plain-text discipline

Why I leave the future to astrology and reach for reference classes, premortems, and calibration logs instead. Disciplined uncertainty in plain text.

Apr 23, 2026
4 min read

Need a job? Sip your drink. We'll look for you.

Why I stopped applying the LinkedIn way and built a quiet service that does the grind for me, and now for you. Drop a résumé once, get a ranked daily shortlist with a one-line pitch hint per role.

Mar 29, 2026
7 min read

I Ran 12 AI Agents for 47 Hours. Here's What Survived.

Open-source deterministic orchestrator for parallel CLI coding agents. Runs Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI in parallel: zero coordination tokens, 37 adapters, janitor verification, git worktree isolation.

Mar 11, 2026
5 min read

Working Under Repeated Alarms

A short note from Israel on what repeated alarms do to attention, engineering judgment, and team habits, and which working practices make interruption easier to absorb.

+2
Mar 10, 2026
22 min read

How to Build Legal Answering Systems That Can Be Trusted

A practical blueprint for legal QA, shaped in part by work around the Agentic RAG Legal Challenge: document identity, hybrid retrieval, structured answers, page-level grounding, telemetry, and evals.

+2
Mar 9, 2026
5 min read

LLM Product Safety Without Theater

A practical guide to LLM product safety: prompt injection, excessive agency, unsafe outputs, evals, and sober boundaries.

+2
Mar 6, 2026
7 min read

Interface Design for Serious Products

A practical memo on calm authority, visible product care, restrained motion, and why trustworthy interfaces feel expensive.

Mar 4, 2026
5 min read

Getting AI-Assisted Development to Green Without Breaking the Code

Repair loops, small diffs, test trust, and how to get CI back to green without trashing the codebase.

+2
Mar 2, 2026
5 min read

Building Agentic AI Systems That Hold Up

Practical guidance on tool contracts, context engineering, evals, approvals, and telemetry.

Feb 24, 2026
6 min read

Which Query Transformation Techniques Actually Help RAG?

HyDE, query rewrite, decomposition, step-back prompting, and fusion for RAG: which query transformation technique fixes which retrieval failure, and when the extra latency pays off.

+2
Feb 18, 2026
5 min read

Preventing Hallucinations in LLM Systems

How to reduce hallucinations in LLM systems with better retrieval, abstention, verification, evals, and guardrails.

+2
Feb 12, 2026
5 min read

Most RAG Failures Start in the Documents

Chunking, titles, metadata, parent-child structure, reranking, and corpus QA for RAG systems.

+2
Feb 6, 2026
5 min read

Spec-Driven Development: the workflow I actually use

How I use a lightweight spec-driven workflow in real projects, what SDDRush automates, and where Kotef fits if you want a stronger agent layer.

+1
Feb 3, 2026
6 min read

How to Run LLM Evals in Production

LLM evals for continuous delivery: turn production failures into automated tests, grade traces with task-specific graders, and block bad releases with eval-driven gates.

+1
Jan 29, 2026
4 min read

Prompt Engineering: From Phrasing to Policy

Prompt design now means response formats, examples, tools, and eval loops, not incantations.

+1
Jan 14, 2026
4 min read

BI Storytelling That Actually Moves Decisions

How to make BI pages support decisions through narrative, visual hierarchy, and trust.

+2
Jul 15, 2025
8 min read

SYNAPSE: adaptive-control software engineering, prototyped

SYNAPSE was a 2025 framework for AI agents that adapt their own success criteria via MCDM. The deterministic-control-plane idea later shipped as Bernstein.

+1