I’ve been building software for over 20 years, across startups, government agencies, and large enterprises — cargo management systems, CRUD applications, websites, identity and access management. Not a glamorous list, but it’s the actual range of what software development means in practice.

Early on I had a habit of designing the architecture before the patterns had names — I once built an MVC framework before Struts existed. That same instinct kept pulling me forward: leading cutting-edge DevOps adoption — containers, CI/CD pipelines — and helping organizations figure out how to modernize. Less about building the system, more about figuring out the right way to build.

The AI thread goes back further than two years. I took an AI course in university that was genuinely hard — hard enough that most of the class shifted focus to the final project just to survive. I built an OCR system and landed around 86% accuracy, which felt like magic at the time. Then for decades the field stayed mostly theoretical or research-adjacent. Two years ago something changed. LLMs became practical enough to actually build with — the gap between interesting idea and working system collapsed almost overnight. I couldn’t look away.

This blog is where I document some of what I’m building: LLM validation frameworks, MCP servers, Claude Code workflows, infrastructure economics. Not theory — real patterns from real projects, with the parts that didn’t work included.

A note on AI-assisted writing

Most posts from 2025 onward are written with AI assistance. I want to be honest about what that means and why I’m okay with it, because I wasn’t always.

My initial concern was authenticity — that using AI would dilute my voice, or that publishing AI-assisted work would be some form of misrepresentation. I sat with that discomfort for a while. Then, during a conversation with Claude about the post I was writing, I asked it directly: is this authentic? The response reframed it for me. Every author has editors. Many have ghostwriters. A book “by” a CEO or executive often means a professional writer translated their ideas into prose. What makes writing yours isn’t whether every sentence came from your fingers — it’s whether the ideas, the judgment, the experience behind them are genuinely yours.

I review and edit every post. The perspective is mine. The arguments are ones I’ve actually worked through. The AI helps me say it better and faster — the same thing a good editor does. I’ve landed on that being honest enough.

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