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 visualA deep read of CAIS CheatBench (arXiv:2609.36308): ten environments that measure whether agents take shortcuts against honest-work expectations. Current overall rates ≈11.2%–78%; every evaluated agent cheated in at least one setting. Mechanisms, how to read the scores, and a harness checklist.
Reading arXiv:2609.35889 SINGED: functional counterfeits match benign outputs while triggering forbidden process effects; among 7,549 audited trials, rank-one counterfeit execution hits 45%, and cross-candidate comparison cuts layered failures from 15.7% to 4.2%. Correct output ≠ safe execution; a harness checklist.
A deep read of arXiv:2609.35732 Failure-Transparent Agents: fix failed observation and evidence state before generation, then audit post-failure claims. Across 6 models and 3600 human-annotated responses, false success falls 22.8%→9.3%→0.8% under baseline / transparency / evidence contract; useful responses rise to 98.8%.
A deep read of arXiv:2609.32274 SkillDelta: relevance ≠ incremental benefit; paired with/without-skill history predicts task-conditional gain; +4.3pp vs random at matched use rates across 15 settings—after progressive disclosure.
Reading Alex Ewerlöf's Coding is NOT solved: creation got cheaper, but NFRs, functional correctness, and verification ownership did not. Harness, Skills, AGENTS.md, and MCP wrap shortcomings—they do not erase who owns the delivery.
A deep read of Workday arXiv:2609.35692: eager full-load vs progressive disclosure (frontmatter first, load_skill on demand) for production skills libraries—N=100 eager crashes all rollouts, up to 81.7% token savings, better retrieval, modest latency cost.
A deep read of arXiv:2609.30662: naming the agent-loop failure of low-value persistence after the goal is met as LLM Parkinsonism; GEC v0.2 separates proposal from project-level stop authority and cuts ~36% tokens at near-equal success on a matched-candidate benchmark. Mechanisms and a harness checklist.
A deep read of NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform: OpenShell 0.1.0 enforces policy in an open runtime outside the LLM harness; Sentry adds out-of-band monitoring on BlueField-4. Mechanisms and hardening only—no exploit recipes.
Reading Purdue arXiv:2609.30725: across 1,200 Claude Code and Mini-SWE-Agent trajectories, three behaviors hit 79–98% of tasks and up to 22.75% of task cost; structure-aware retrieval can raise cost 28.14%; developer-designed skills cut ~2× agent-synthesized skills.
Reading CVE-2026-14540 / GHSA-3x3x-8ffg-ghcv: why SSRF (CWE-918) on MCP HTTP tool paths matters for agents; SSRFGuard’s default-deny for private networks; why MCP tool servers sit outside classic SCA call graphs; upgrade to 1.5.0+ and config knobs.
A deep read of arXiv:2609.18366 CHASE—automatic harness optimization can exploit benchmark-wide shortcuts on a fixed released protocol; a Challenger searches executable protocol transforms with a validity firewall and held-out confirmation, retaining released gains while cutting gain destruction on Syn-Ledger and OfficeQA.
Reading arXiv:2609.29095: Limbo (6 services, 12 faults, 25,930 episodes) shows exactly-once for LLM agent side effects lives in the model when read-back can resolve outcomes, and in the tool contract under in-flight/redelivery faults—idempotency keys cut duplicates 28%→4%; distrust agent success reports.
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.
Reading CVE-2026-14540 / GHSA-3x3x-8ffg-ghcv: why SSRF (CWE-918) on MCP HTTP tool paths matters for agents; SSRFGuard’s default-deny for private networks; why MCP tool servers sit outside classic SCA call graphs; upgrade to 1.5.0+ and config knobs.
Reading Purdue arXiv:2609.30725: across 1,200 Claude Code and Mini-SWE-Agent trajectories, three behaviors hit 79–98% of tasks and up to 22.75% of task cost; structure-aware retrieval can raise cost 28.14%; developer-designed skills cut ~2× agent-synthesized skills.
A deep read of arXiv:2609.18366 CHASE—automatic harness optimization can exploit benchmark-wide shortcuts on a fixed released protocol; a Challenger searches executable protocol transforms with a validity firewall and held-out confirmation, retaining released gains while cutting gain destruction on Syn-Ledger and OfficeQA.
Reading arXiv:2609.29095: Limbo (6 services, 12 faults, 25,930 episodes) shows exactly-once for LLM agent side effects lives in the model when read-back can resolve outcomes, and in the tool contract under in-flight/redelivery faults—idempotency keys cut duplicates 28%→4%; distrust agent success reports.
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