Field Guides
Field Guides go deeper than the blog - long-form, hands-on walkthroughs that take one topic from start to finish, gotchas and all. The kind of thing I wish I'd had the first time I hit the problem.
Each Field Guide comes from actually building the thing, so you get the dead-ends and the fixes, not just the happy path. Work through one and you'll come out the other side with something running - not just a vague sense of how it works.
GTM Engineering with Agents: A Field Guide to Automating the Funnel
Every go-to-market team is really running a handful of pipelines. Leads come in, get cleaned up, get scored, get worked, and either turn into revenue or quietly rot. Most of that…
AI Project Management: Shipping Software When Agents Write the Code
Something strange happened to my job this year. The typing got cheap. An agent can turn a paragraph of intent into a working pull request while I refill my coffee, and yet the…
Mastering Hermes
Most of this series treats Hermes as the place its ideas land. Building Your Agentic OS pivots to it, Running the Fleet orchestrates on it, Self-Hosting the Agentic Stack deploys…
Agent Memory: A Field Guide
Two people give the same agent the same task and get wildly different results. Most of the time it isn't the prompt. It's that one of them gave the agent a memory and the other is…
Loop Engineering: Designing Agents That Run Themselves
Everyone obsesses over which model to use. Almost nobody engineers the fifty lines of code wrapped around it, the loop that decides what the model sees, when it gets to act, when…
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The Agentic Playbook
Everyone agrees you should be building agents. Nobody agrees on how. One camp says drag nodes on a canvas and ship this afternoon. The other says real agents live in code, in your…
QA in the Era of AI
I've worked at companies with entire QA departments: rooms of people clicking through the same flows before every release, filing tickets, arguing about repro steps. Most of that…
Self-Hosting the Agentic Stack: A Field Guide
You can build all of this on someone else's servers. Rent an agent platform, a managed database, a hosted automation tool, pay per task, and watch your data flow through systems…
Agent Guardrails: A Field Guide to Safety & Permissions
Everyone wants an agent they can let run. Hand it a goal, walk away, come back to finished work. The thing standing between you and that is trust, and trust isn't something you…
Agent Skills: A Field Guide to the Third Pillar
Your agent can write code. But does it know how your team cuts a release? Can it run your incident playbook the same way twice, or does it improvise something a little different…
The Agent's Self: A Field Guide to Personality & Identity
Give two people the same agent and the same task and you'll often get two different results. The usual assumption is that the better result came from a better prompt. Just as…
The 70/30 Engineer
The machine does about 70% of the typing now. That part is real, and it's not going back in the box. But the work that's left (guiding the agent, verifying what it produces, and…
Mastering Directus
Directus has quietly become the first thing I reach for on almost every project, and not just as a headless CMS. Point it at a Postgres database and you get an instant REST and…
Roll Your Own Coding Agent
Build a minimal coding agent from scratch (the tool-calling loop, context, and the Guide/Generate/Verify/Solve cycle in real code) so you understand exactly what's under Claude…
Postgres for App Developers
Not DBA theory, the 20% of Postgres that carries 80% of real apps: schema design, indexing, transactions, the query patterns that matter, and the gotchas that bite in production.
Mastering n8n
If Directus is the first thing I stand up on a new project, n8n is the second. It's the workflow automation tool I reach for whenever something needs to talk to something else…
Technical Due Diligence
The guide investors and acquirers wish existed, how to assess a codebase, team, and architecture for risk before you write the check, with a repeatable checklist and red-flag…
Auth, Done Right
Sessions, cookies, password hashing, and the subtle things people get wrong, a practical, build-along guide to authentication that's secure by default, without reaching for a SaaS.
Background Jobs & Queues
The part of every real app nobody teaches well: workers, queues, retries, idempotency, scheduling, and dead-letter handling, built up from first principles into a system you can…
Build vs. Buy in the AI Era
A decision framework for founders drowning in "should we build this with AI or pay for it", when to build, when to buy, when to wait, and how the economics changed once agents…