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.
5 posts
6 min read
Your banned-word list expired in March 2024
Naming a tell is what kills it, so any list of AI words starts dying the day it ships. Underneath sits the failure no list touches: the draft commits to nothing. I built an editing skill for that one.
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.
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
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
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