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Essays

Deep engineering writing on production AI systems, distributed systems, failure modes, and architecture judgment.

Essay results

16 essays

Agents12 min readOctober 25, 2026

MCP vs Agent Skills vs A2A: What Each Does in a Real AI Agent

An AI agent finishes a database-migration review, but the dashboard says the migration ran. Understand how Agent Skills, MCP, A2A, and application state fit together.

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Production AI Systems16 min readOctober 2, 2026

OpenAI Decisions API vs Jev: Designing Systems Around Decisions Instead of Generation

A technical comparison of OpenAI Decisions API and Jev, and how to design a decision layer for routing, tool selection, risk, abstention, calibration and AI agent control.

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Production AI Systems20 min readSeptember 29, 2026

Why Jev Is So Fast: What System One Models Remove from LLM Inference

Why Jev can return decisions in hundreds of milliseconds. A technical look at LLM decode, parallel decisions, latency, throughput, benchmarks, and what TypeSafe has not disclosed.

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Production AI Systems14 min readSeptember 21, 2026

Designing Production AI Systems with Jev

Jev is useful when an AI system needs fast bounded decisions around generative work. The production design still needs state construction, versioned questions, policy, calibration, observability, and clear boundaries around when to act, escalate, or collect more evidence.

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Production AI Systems11 min readSeptember 20, 2026

A Skill Is Not a File. It Is a Deploy: Designing Agent Skills Infrastructure

Production Agent Skills are deployments, not files. They need immutable versions, controlled rollout, revocation, trust boundaries, progressive resolution, and a runtime path designed for scale.

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Production AI Systems7 min readSeptember 5, 2026

Designing Identity and Delegation for Production AI Agents

Production AI agents need explicit human identity, managed agent identity, trusted workload identity, narrow delegation, and an evidence chain that survives every authorization hop.

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Production AI Systems12 min readSeptember 1, 2026

Stateless MCP Didn't Delete Your State: Designing Production MCP Infrastructure

Stateless MCP removes hidden protocol sessions, not application state. Production infrastructure still needs explicit interaction state, durable Tasks, identity, business effect tracking, routing, admission control, and failover.

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RAG14 min readJuly 19, 2026

Designing a Production RAG System for 50 Million Documents

A production RAG system at 50 million documents is not only a retrieval problem. The hard parts are ingestion, freshness, permissions, evaluation, observability, cost, and operational control.

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LLM Infrastructure16 min readJuly 4, 2026

Your LLM Router Can Make Cheap Models Expensive

Why cheap LLM routing can cost more when model switches break cache locality, and how to design a cache aware gateway for agents and chat.

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LLM Infrastructure24 min readJune 30, 2026

LLM Inference Is a Scheduler Problem

LLM inference performance is shaped by prefill, decode, KV cache, continuous batching, batching policy, queueing and scheduler tradeoffs, not just model speed.

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LLM Infrastructure25 min readJune 27, 2026

Your LLM Rate Limiter Is Counting the Wrong Thing

The system design of LLM Rate Limiter.

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LLM Infrastructure10 min readJune 23, 2026

Your LLM Dashboard Is Lying About Load

Request count is a weak signal in LLM systems. Real load comes from tokens, context length, prefill, decode, tools, retries, queues, and tail latency.

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LLM Infrastructure26 min readJune 21, 2026

One Tenant Can Break Your LLM Platform Without Sending Many Requests

The system design of multi-tenant LLM serving.

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Reliability10 min readMay 31, 2026

Your LLM System Isnt Slow. Your Tail Is Slow.

LLM systems rarely fail because the average request is slow. They fail because the tail gets worse when retrieval, model calls, tools, retries, and streaming delays stack together.

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Reliability9 min readMay 24, 2026

Retries Make LLM Systems Less Reliable

Retries help normal distributed systems recover from transient failure. In LLM systems, they can also amplify cost, latency, duplicate work, fallback drift and wrong product behavior.

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