Building Daddy Note: A Piano Practice App for My Daughter, Built in 4 Days by AI Agents
A piano practice app for my daughter: I wore every hat from spec to tracking, AI agents did the building, and one robot had no rhythm.
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Technology
Cloud architecture, AI, enterprise engineering, and software development — everything that keeps the lights on and the systems running at scale.
35 posts
Passkeys: The Quiet Funeral of the Password
Passkeys are replacing passwords one login at a time. Here is why they are safer, and what to do this week.
2 min read
Give Your AI Agent a Job Description
AI agents work best when treated like new hires: clear scope, limited access, and someone accountable. A worked example from an e-commerce platform.
3 min read
Secrets Sprawl: The Quiet Security Debt in Your Stack
API keys and tokens multiply faster than anyone tracks them. Here is why secrets sprawl is the debt nobody budgets for, and how to start paying it down.
2 min read
Jev: A Decision Model, Not Another LLM
TypeSafe AI’s new Jev model returns structured decisions with confidence scores instead of text. Here is what is publicly claimed, what is unproven, and where it could sit in an e-commerce architecture.
2 min read
CAG for the Knowledge That Never Changes
Cache-Augmented Generation skips retrieval entirely by preloading stable knowledge into the model’s context. For the right slice of an e-commerce stack, it is faster and simpler than RAG.
2 min read
The Quiet Return of the Batch Job
We spent a decade making everything real-time. Then we bolted AI onto it and discovered that some work is happier waiting its turn.
2 min read
Your Agent Doesn't Have a Memory Problem. It Has a Filing Problem.
Every team that hits the wall on a long-running agent reaches for the same lever: a bigger context window. It is almost always the wrong lever. What is actually broken is the decision about what gets written down, what gets thrown away, and who decides.
10 min read
Your Catalog Is Not a Pile of Documents
A follow-up to architecting commerce for AI agents. Once an agent can reach your store, something has to decide what comes back — and the standard chunk-embed-search pipeline quietly breaks on every one of the four retrieval problems commerce actually has.
11 min read
The Eval Gap: Nobody Can Tell You If It's Working
Most teams shipping AI features cannot answer the simplest question about them — is this actually good? Evaluation is not a testing chore. It is the definition of correct, and writing it down is the hardest and most valuable work in the project.
8 min read
Who Is Your AI Agent Logging In As?
Most organisations have given their AI agents real power and borrowed credentials. The identity question sounds like plumbing, but it decides whether an agent is auditable, revocable, and safe to expand.
9 min read
When Your Bank's Fraud Alert Is Actually an AI Agent
Banks are swapping robocalls and hold queues for conversational AI agents that resolve fraud alerts in one call — and that’s opening a new front in caller verification.
2 min read
From Feedback to Feature: Six Turns With an AI Agent
One user’s complaint that Aroi Care was ‘closed-ended’ turned into six turns of a spec conversation with an AI coding agent — and almost none of the real work was typing code. It was reading feedback closely, refusing to over-fit to one example, and catching the moment a taxonomy quietly became a safety decision.
7 min read
When Your Browser Starts Doing Your Errands
AI agents are moving from chatbots to actual browser co-pilots — here’s what that means the next time your flight gets cancelled.
2 min read
Building an E-Commerce Stack AI Agents Can Actually Shop
A practical architecture for e-commerce built for autonomous AI shopping agents — headless commerce, discoverability, the protocol layer, agent authentication, and the measurement blind spot most retailers haven’t solved yet.
9 min read
The Web Just Learned to Let AI Agents Pay for Things
A new layer of trust protocols is letting AI agents complete purchases on your behalf — without ever seeing your card number. Here’s why that quiet plumbing change matters more than the flashy demos.
2 min read
The AI Agent That Rebooks Your Flight Before You Notice It's Cancelled
Agentic AI is quietly rewriting how airlines handle disruptions — and the same pattern is reshaping every industry that runs on broken promises.
2 min read
Semantic Caching: The Cheapest AI Answer Is the One You Don't Regenerate
Traditional caches only recognise a question they’ve seen letter for letter. Semantic caching recognises meaning — and for the thousandth shopper asking ‘does this run small?’ in slightly different words, that difference is most of your bill.
3 min read
AI FinOps: Your Token Bill Is the New Cloud Bill
The first cloud bill that made a CFO flinch was for servers nobody remembered switching on. The next one is for tokens — and the discipline that tames it is one we already learned a decade ago. A deeper field guide to AI FinOps.
6 min read
Prompt Injection Is the New SQL Injection
The story of the moment an AI processor almost did what a stranger’s text told it to — and why prompt injection becomes a real security problem the instant AI stops being a chatbot and starts running unattended inside your application.
6 min read
The AI Gateway: Air Traffic Control for Your Models
As teams wire up a dozen different models, a new piece of plumbing quietly becomes essential — the AI gateway that routes, governs, and pays the bills. Here’s the architecture, with an airline booking example.
5 min read
Context Engineering Is the Skill Prompt Engineering Was Pretending to Be
The clever one-liner prompt is fading. The real craft now is deciding what an AI model gets to see before it answers.
3 min read
From 'Can I Eat This?' to Aroi Care: Building a Bilingual AI Food-Safety Advisor
The story of building Aroi Care — a bilingual EN/TH AI food-safety advisor — from a one-line idea to a live app with a Gemini-powered analysis pipeline, two-tier caching, and a hard budget kill switch.
9 min read
The Path to AI Product Manager: Building Products That Think
The AI PM is the most in-demand, least-defined role in tech right now. Here’s what the job actually is, what it demands, and how to get there from wherever you’re standing.
5 min read
Architecting Neural Product Search with Personalization for E-Commerce
A reference architecture for e-commerce search that understands natural language queries and personalizes results to size, style, color, and persona.
3 min read
Agentic Coding Assistants Are Growing Up
AI coding agents have moved from autocomplete to autonomous teammates — here’s what that shift actually means for engineering teams.
2 min read
Small Models, Big Shift: Why Edge AI Is the Quiet Story of 2026
The headlines chase ever-larger frontier models, but the more interesting move in 2026 is downward — small, capable models running on the device in your hand.
2 min read
Google ADK 2.0: Building a Dynamic Promotion Engine for Ecommerce
ADK 2.0’s graph-based workflows and dynamic loops unlock something traditional automation can’t do — an AI agent that monitors a flash sale in real time and adapts promotions on the fly.
6 min read
AI-Driven Development: Building a Smarter Ecommerce Platform from the Ground Up
AI-driven development isn’t about replacing engineers — it’s about rethinking how software systems are designed, built, and evolved. Here’s what that looks like in practice, using an ecommerce platform as the blueprint.
9 min read
Agentic AI: The Shift from Assistant to Actor
AI is no longer just answering questions — it’s taking actions. Here’s what the rise of agentic systems means for how we build and work.
2 min read
AI Context Windows Are Getting Ridiculous — And That's a Good Thing
Context windows have exploded from 4K to millions of tokens. What does that actually change for how we build and think?
2 min read
I Let an AI Build My Blog. Here's What Happened (Spoiler: It Worked)
A Technology Polymath who has spent 20 years telling clients to embrace AI finally turns the mirror on himself. What followed was a zero-server, near-zero-cost blog built almost entirely with Claude — and only mildly embarrassing.
2 min read
Building AI Features That Earn Their Place in Production
Most AI feature experiments share the same fate: impressive demo, uncomfortable production metrics, quiet retirement. Here’s the design thinking that changes the outcome.
2 min read
Zero-Downtime Migration: What the Case Studies Don't Tell You
Every cloud migration case study ends with success. None of them tell you about the Thursday at 2am when the database connection pool hit zero during a live flash sale.
2 min read
Your Digital Transformation Failed in Month One. You Just Don't Know It Yet.
After two decades of inheriting other people’s burning platforms, I can tell you exactly when enterprise transformations die — and it’s not when the CTO finally admits it.
2 min read