$ ls topics/engineering/
engineering/
the software practices that make fleet builds repeatable
· engineeringJul 2026The paper intake for an AuDHD assessment is 238 questions. I wrote an app.Modelling 7 clinical instruments as database rows instead of code — so adding an eighth is a JSON import, not a branch.7 min· engineeringJul 2026Shift-left quality in an agentic dev pipeline: five structural changes that move Critic catches earlierWhat one structured multi-agent pipeline learned from iterating on when its reviewer fires, not how thorough it is.5 min· engineeringJul 2026A clean audit run proves nothingAn LLM auditor that comes back empty hands you one data point, not a verdict. Here is what done actually looks like.11 min· engineeringJul 2026Stop asking agents what they costAgents can't observe their own token costs, so the harness has to. Building that instrumentation uncovered four silent failures in a row.9 min· engineeringJul 2026Vectors in the file you already havesqlite-vec brings semantic search to a personal assistant without a vector service: same SQLite file, vectors as a derived index allowed to fail.8 min· engineeringJun 2026Tabs between neighbours: the mutual-credit architecture of GrowOperativeGrowOperative lets neighbours trade surplus food on a running tab in Canadian dollars, no cash on each exchange. Underneath sits a mutual-credit protocol: bilateral trustlines, atomic multi-hop payments through friends of friends, debts that cancel around a loop, and a pure-math core built to outlive its first backend.12 min· engineeringJun 2026The model can't leak what it was never givenA prompt that says 'don't reveal anything confidential' guards the wrong layer. Filter the corpus by role at the loader, before the model sees a token, and the leak becomes impossible by construction.8 min· engineeringJun 2026One process, one fileM.O.T. runs a whole personal AI assistant (tickets, memory, search, 26 MCP tools) on one Next.js process and one SQLite file. The five-service diagram is a choice, and most of the time nobody chose it on purpose.8 min· engineeringJun 2026Where the subject never touches the systemMemoirQuill turns a recorded interview into a grounded memoir chapter — without the storyteller ever opening an app. The immutable-source, provenance-first architecture.5 min