Technical articles and notes
Writing about infrastructure, networking, and software — and lately, about building and debugging AI agents.
24 August 2026
An agent that can run commands across a fleet is a genuinely good debugging partner, but only if you impose the discipline that a good engineer already has. Left to itself it will do the thing everyone does under pressure: form a theory early, find something that looks like confirmation, and declare victory. The premature root cause The pattern is reliable enough to plan around. Something breaks shortly after a change.
2 August 2026
Most agent failures I debug are not reasoning failures. They are interface failures: a tool returned something unusable, and the model did something reasonable with bad information. The fix is almost never a better prompt. It is a better tool. Error messages are prompts When a tool fails, its error message goes straight into the model’s context and becomes an instruction about what to do next. This makes error text part of your prompt engineering whether you designed it that way or not.
14 July 2026
Prompt engineering was a phase. What actually determines whether an agent succeeds on a long task is not the wording of its instructions but what ends up inside its context window at the moment it has to decide something. That is an engineering problem, and it has more in common with cache design than with writing. The window is a budget, not a container Every token in context competes with every other token.