Essays
The Journal253 essays
Long-form writing on AI, philosophy, psychology, and systems thinking.
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The phenomenology of working with AI: what it actually feels like to think alongside a machine
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The Ethics of Data Collection at Scale
Organizations collect much more data per customer interaction than they did in 2018. Cheap storage made hoarding easy, so restraint has to be a choice. The gap between what we can collect and what we should collect is a technical team's responsibility.
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Integration patterns: What enterprise architecture teaches about organizing a life
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The Thundering Herd of 2026: SRE for AI Agents
AI agents produce correlated traffic bursts that traditional capacity planning cannot predict. SRE for agents means planning for the herd. Traditional capacity planning cannot handle their correlated burst patterns. New SRE approaches are required.
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Zero-Trust Architecture as Epistemic Humility
Zero-trust architecture shrinks the attack surface and makes lateral movement much harder, because every request has to prove itself. Zero trust is epistemic humility, not paranoia.
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Simone Weil on Attention and Code Review Practice
Simone Weil called attention the rarest form of generosity. Applied to code review, attention means reading code to understand the mind that wrote it, not just to find bugs.
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Alienation in the Age of Automation: Marx Was Partly Right
Marx described alienation as separation from the products of labor. The automation industry has scaled that separation. Designing automation that preserves meaning is an engineering responsibility.
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Retrieval-Augmented Generation and the 89% Problem
My RAG pipeline reached 89% retrieval relevance, and the rest of its answers were built on the wrong context while sounding just as confident. These errors are harder to detect than hallucination because every verification signal confirms the response.
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Internal Developer Platforms Should Feel Like Products
Internal developer platforms built with product management principles win clearly broader adoption than platforms that rely on mandates.
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AI Ethics Guidelines Are Architecture Requirements
Treating AI ethics guidelines as architecture requirements, not compliance checklists, reduced post-deployment ethical incidents in the systems I built. Ethics constraints force better engineering discipline.