◈AI

Evaluation: How Do You Know It Worked

"Looks right" and "is right" are different claims — an agent only checked by eyeballing the transcript will drift for weeks before anyone notices.

Guardrails: Stopping the Agent From Hurting Itself

Capable and safe to leave unattended are different claims. Guardrails close the gap — permission boundaries, confirmation on the irreversible, and a cap on how much one bad turn can do.

How AI Agent Memory Actually Works

Memory in AI agents isn't one thing. It's a stack of storage, indexing, and retrieval systems that fail in different ways.

Observability: Watching an Agent Think

Part four called episodic memory the layer most agents skip. This is that layer, built — every decision logged, because a silent failure is the only kind you can't debug.

Planning and Reasoning: When One Call Isn't Enough

One tool call at a time works until the task has more than one step with a dependency between them. Then the loop needs an explicit plan, not just a next guess.

Shipping an Agent That Survives Contact With Reality

Nine parts from the bare loop to a system with real memory, evaluation and guardrails — what actually mattered, and the one layer that made every other layer debuggable.

The Agent Loop

Call the model, parse a tool call, run it, feed the result back. The whole mechanism takes an afternoon — everything else in this series is what happens after.

Tool Use: Giving the Agent Hands

The tool schema is a contract, not a suggestion. Most tool-calling failures are the contract being too loose, not the model being too dumb.

RAG Explained Like a Real Workflow

Retrieval-augmented generation is a research assistant with a filing cabinet. The failures are filing failures, not thinking failures.

What MCP Actually Does

Building RepoTwin

A repo intelligence twin — clone, index, embed, map, query. What worked, what I rewrote twice, and where it still falls down.

Running Small Local Models on My Homelab

Q6_K quantization, GGUF, and what 24GB of VRAM actually buys you in real throughput rather than benchmark numbers.

AI Agent Architecture Map

How I Structure AI Agent Repos

A clean, boring layout that survives an agent growing from one script into a system — and the one rule that keeps it clean.

Cool Tools for AI, Cyber, and Builders