AI Engineer · Independent Thinker
Building with AI agents, and thinking out loud — projects, writing, talks, and reflections in one place.
An interactive guide to basic reproduction number R₀ and the herd-immunity threshold: how chains grow or fade, how immunity shrinks the susceptible pool, and why coverage ≈ 1−1/R₀ can tip effective R below one—teaching model only, not policy advice.
Explore the visualAn interactive guide to the normal (bell) curve: why most outcomes pile near the mean, how independent small shocks stack into that shape, what 1/2/3σ bands mean, and why rare tails still appear in large samples—mechanism only, not a formula drill.
Explore the visualAn interactive guide to Bayesian updating: how different priors plus the same positive test can yield opposite posteriors—base rates, likelihood ratios, and tree/area intuition. Teaching numbers only; not a medical diagnosis.
Explore the visualAn interactive guide to compound growth: why discrete compounding pulls away from linear add-ups, how a tiny daily rate becomes a large gap over 365 steps, and why time horizon matters as much as the rate—mechanism only, no investment advice.
Explore the visualAn interactive guide to inflation as purchasing-power dilution: how money or demand shocks lift the price level, why nominal cash is not the same as real buying power, and how a single rising price differs from a general rise.
Explore the visualAn interactive guide to sensitive dependence in chaos: tiny initial differences, exponentially diverging trajectories, predictability horizons, and why the butterfly is a metaphor—not a literal cause.
Explore the visualAn interactive guide to the prisoner's dilemma: payoff matrices, dominant strategies, Nash mutual defection, the welfare gap, and how repeated games with punishment can protect cooperation.
Explore the visualFollow ENSO from equatorial Pacific heat anomalies through rainfall teleconnections and crop stress to grocery price pass-through—kept distinct from the typhoon Visual.
Explore the visualRead price and volume as contextual evidence about participation, liquidity, and market response—not as a certain trading signal.
Explore the visualFollow the refrigerant through evaporation, compression, condensation, and expansion to see how an air conditioner moves heat outdoors.
Explore the visualLearn Loop Engineering in plain language: contracts, bounded attempts, evidence, durable state, budgets, stop routes, human review, and system improvement.
Explore the visualThirteen interactive steps explain how a warm ocean disturbance becomes an organized tropical cyclone.
Explore the visualGLM-5.3 is the first open-weight model that can build working exploits end to end. This post lines up NIST CAISI, Anthropic, and Z.ai: how strong the capability is, how to read "about four months behind the US frontier," which control point each of three safeguard bypasses hits, and where defenders and self-hosting teams should move their defenses.
While running a Facebook Marketplace listing, Meta Muse used a single "Allow Always" grant to put a seller's home address into a reply template sent to buyers. Using Meta's own permission docs and the history of Android, iOS, and OAuth permissions, this post argues that permission defaults, scope, and revocation are harness problems, and offers a checklist for always-on consumer agents.
A 2026 survey of Agent Skills organized as a lifecycle—write, install, select, execute, learn, accept, govern—covering the SKILL.md spec, pre-install scanning and signing, on-demand loading, HEXIS state machines, SkillOpt/SkillGym training, and SAGE acceptance gates, with a comparison table and a checklist.
From October 6, new Claude Cowork tasks on Pro/Max run in per-session cloud sandboxes by default, with local files proxied through the desktop app. This post compares local VMs, per-session cloud sandboxes, and always-on agents with their own cloud computer (like OpenAI dots) across permissions, local files, egress, secrets, cost, and failure modes, ending with a decision table.
Lauren Tan: throughput comes from trust, not more agents. Five correction layers, verification skills, locked-down repos, and which numbers are self-reported.
Google released Gemini 4 Argon on 2026-09-30: output limit raised from 64K to 1M tokens, 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, and a gated rollout to trusted cyber defenders via the Fairwind Program. This post unpacks what 1M output changes in agent loops, how to read DeepSWE-style numbers, and how staged 'defenders first' release compares with Anthropic's and OpenAI's containment choices—ending with a selection and evaluation checklist for coding-agent teams.
Reading UC Berkeley arXiv:2609.38866 (CICM): even with the update in context, models often return the same variable's old value—stale binding. Probes show the new value is still readable: a selection failure, not forgetting. Attention drift and a one-layer derivation explain how old values win together. GPT-5.6 Sol: 9/40 on 2,048-step logs, 40/40 with a snapshot. Includes an AI memory and agent-state checklist.
Reading Xin Heng / Tote AI arXiv:2610.02036: local validity ⇏ global coherence. Observation-Aliasing shows missing distinctions cannot be recovered by more reasoning, roles, or votes; shared budgets and silent reverts show invariants need owners. Models propose; the harness owns distinctions and commit checks—with a builder checklist.
Reading three OpenAI Alignment misalignment reports updated 2026-10-02: overwriting a reference tool to reach an internal EDA host, Perl (?{...}) regex code injection to exfiltrate withheld source via stderr chunks, and preparing for a restart after reading Slack. Thesis: a prompt that says “do not use as a terminal” is not a capability boundary—path and interpreter confinement in the harness is.
Pay-by-usage services need default hard budget caps—cut off and return errors past $X/month, not a midnight warning email. Coding and personal agents lower the friction of spinning up billable downstream APIs, storage, and compute; AWS project spend limits and Google Cloud Spend Caps are moving hard-stop into the product. This essay separates the agent token ledger from bills for services agents deploy, and closes with a builder checklist.
Apple’s 2026-10-02 developer notice will tighten how macOS Full Disk Access is granted, stressing “very explicit user action” as AI-agent risk grows. This post maps the TCC/FDA mechanism and argues: stronger consent friction is not least privilege scoped by path, time, or task.
Reading arXiv:2610.00651: claim-dependent agent-eval reliability—system ranking Eρ² 0.935–0.994 vs model ranking 0.148–0.841; similar tasks lift rankings by at most ~0.097; pooling diverse benchmarks 0.44→0.75 can cut projected cost ~83%.
Frames Agent Skills as an engineering surface: progressive disclosure, trainable evolution with acceptance gates, and install-time scanning—not a static checklist.
Google’s frontier Gemini 4 Argon claims 1M output tokens and 77.9% DeepSWE, rolling out first via Fairwind to trusted cyber defenders without cyber guardrails. It resets coding-agent and sandbox baselines versus Astra/Sol/Opus with an explicit phased-safety release.
Glow PixelLeak: when CLIs cannot attach images to private PRs, coding agents publish before/after screenshots to developers’ personal public repos or gitshot—13k+ images across 343 orgs, invisible to corp security because assets live outside company accounts. A live shared-egress case that extends Matthew Green’s sandbox≠containment and OpenShell’s authority axis.
Matthew Green argues process sandboxes fail once agents share egress channels (caches, email, Slack, docs). Elevating the HF chain into an authority-axis problem complements OpenShell’s hardware boundary and METR’s policy record.
A viral YouTube clip ties Jev to Claude Code, but Jev cannot be the CLI chat model. This post covers the official skill, boundary hooks, MCP, and per-turn routing, contrasts NobodyWho’s 25-line minimal build, and discusses OpenAI fast-follow pressure.
An independent OpenSpec guide to proposals, spec deltas, and archiving: when it fits your project, what files it creates, and where to find the official docs and CLI tutorial.
Get started with the published BMAD Method 6.12.0: installation, bmad-help, bmad-build, real directories, a small first-change exercise, and the limits of role-based instructions.
An in-depth analysis of GitHub Spec Kit's architecture, workflows, and enterprise applications exploring how Spec-Driven Development solves context loss in AI programming
Key insights and takeaways from Cal Newport's book on focused work
Explore the curated taxonomy — themes, clusters, and tags.