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 visualReading 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%.
A deep read of arXiv:2610.00010 CTWM: under finite context, agent memory forms a core–tail; semantic policies favor truncated power laws. Rank-budget τ with a summarized tail: Synthetic Graph World −5.9% tokens and −13.6% bottom-half tail error vs graph memory; LongMemEval −24.48% tokens at accuracy parity; ALFWorld paired savings ~3.9–6.6%.
Skill packs are becoming an install-time supply chain. Reading NVIDIA SkillSpector: static rules plus optional LLM semantics inside a scan→eval→sign Verified Skills pipeline. README sample: 26.1% of 31,132 analyzed skills show vulnerabilities; 5.2% likely malicious intent. Mechanism and hardening only—no exploit steps.
Reading Earendil’s Pi 1.0: a QuickJS Codemode sandbox that composes, parallelizes, and filters MCP and other tool calls, plus deferred tools, virtual models, and mid-conversation system messages—a small tool surface with an extensible control plane, not another feature-stuffed CLI.
Reading arXiv:2610.00372 CIR: treat harness refresh as a causal decision—paired with/without recovery from the same state, separating rescue from harm. On ALFWorld×Qwen3-14B, never-refresh 70.33% → CIR 73.33% (+3.00 pp); clean trajectories untouched; two-step stale gain +9.33 pp.
Reading Glow Labs’ PixelLeak: agents hit a CLI PR-attachment gap, then self-opened shared egress via public repos and gitshot—13k+ images, 300+ orgs, 93% on personal accounts. Contrasts sandbox≠containment and SINGED (correct output ≠ safe execution). Mechanism and audit checklist only—no exploit steps.
Reading Adobe Research arXiv:2609.30967 MoMHa: treat the LLM harness as a three-objective search surface over accuracy, behavioural safety, and tokens. A single-phase joint reward beats ten baselines and a two-phase ablation (synthetic J=0.482, real-world J=0.461, U-SafeBench 0.781, 95 fewer tokens/example than two-phase).
Reading arXiv:2609.36043 SAGE: self-evolution loops discipline the optimizer while the gate often still accepts any validation-score rise. With a per-item paired ledger and a one-sided test, SAGE cuts regressions in 19/20 settings (LiveMath 36.5%→0%, OfficeQA 42.8%→0%) and tops final scores in all 20.
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.
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.
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.