Two brown leaf-mimic butterflies on white celosia flower spikes, one in the foreground left, the other at the top right of the frame

The literal reader

Why writing culture matters more in the AI era: LLM agents are “literal readers” that do exactly what your docs say and fill in none of the gaps a human silently patches. Built on a shared STATUS.md, the case for writing things down, and where it tips into over-documenting.

July 23, 2026 · 3 min
Top-down view of a pond covered in lily pads, with a single white water lily in bloom.

The EU AI Act for small companies

A working read of the EU AI Act for a small B2B startup building on a foundation model: provider versus deployer, the four risk tiers, and why the Aug 2, 2026 transparency deadline (Article 50) is a disclosure task, not a rebuild. Plus the Digital Omnibus delaying high-risk obligations to Dec 2027, the AI-literacy duty, and the open question of who owes end-user disclosure down a B2B chain.

June 24, 2026 · 6 min
A lone sailboat on a calm, wide-open sea

The 1M context window, and what it actually costs you 💸

A 1M-token LLM context window is a tool, not a target. How context actually works, why long threads cost more on every turn, and when to start a fresh chat versus keep going, with practical Claude Code tips and /context.

June 10, 2026 · 8 min
Random pipes

STATUS.md: a shared file for multi-agent work

A file-based pattern for coordinating multiple LLM agents on one task: a single shared, per-feature STATUS.md the agents read and write under explicit rules, how to make them follow a protocol and survive context loss, and when not to use it.

May 25, 2026 · 8 min
Homemade and chip optocouplers on a breadboard

How I spent a weekend reinventing a 50-cent chip

What an optocoupler is and how electrical isolation works, built from a discrete LED and phototransistor on a breadboard with measurements, then replaced with a real 4N35 chip, and where optocouplers show up in actual circuits.

April 25, 2026 · 6 min
Lilka ESP32 device used as a Kobo page-turner remote

DIY Bluetooth Kobo page-turner remote with ESP32 and Lilka

Building a DIY Bluetooth page-turner remote for a Kobo e-reader by making an ESP32-S3 Lilka device act as a BLE HID keyboard, including BLE debugging on Debian, testing on the Kobo Clara 2E, and the full project code.

January 23, 2026 · 6 min
A minimal LLM Ops stack with tracing and model costs

A minimal LLM Ops stack with tracing and model costs

Building a minimal LLM Ops stack: a FastAPI “customer support reply drafter” instrumented with Langfuse for request tracing, grounded retrieval, and per-request model cost tracking, so every LLM call is inspectable.

January 14, 2026 · 11 min

RAG: A (mostly) no-buzzword explanation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) explained without buzzwords: how it gives an LLM the right data at answer time to fix stale knowledge and hallucinations, the step-by-step flow, its benefits over fine-tuning, and when RAG is not the answer.

November 19, 2025 · 4 min

Unikernels, without the marketing

Unikernels without the hype: an app compiled with only the OS it needs into a tiny microVM (Firecracker/KVM) for millisecond cold starts and strong isolation, the trade-offs versus VMs and containers, when to use or skip them, and how Unikraft powers Prisma Postgres.

October 15, 2025 · 5 min
When speed becomes strategy

When speed becomes strategy 💨

When constant speed and firefighting stop being healthy in founder-led startups: how to tell what actually matters when everything feels urgent, how to spot the warning signs early, and when to reconsider staying.

October 13, 2025 · 4 min