Engineering
Four production systems, written up as case studies rather than as results. A gateway in front of several model backends, a real-time tracking component in Rust, a state store holding a body of fiction too large for a context window, and the pipeline that keeps a six-book series consistent with itself.
The recurring theme is what a system reports about itself while it is failing. Two of these were broken on purpose to find out, and in both cases the logs stayed clean throughout — every request answered, every failover recorded as a success, and almost nothing actually delivered. A system that cannot describe its own failure is not observable, however much it emits.
4 articles in this section · all 25 articles, newest first →
Systems under fault
Two components taken apart while running, one by deliberate fault injection and one by an architectural change measured before and after.
A Hundred Per Cent Success Rate and One Usable Answer
August 2026Backpressure removed from a model gateway to see what would break. Thirty-two callers, thirty-two HTTP 200s, and thirty-one of them arrived after the caller had already given up. Then a backend was made slow instead of dead, and failover logged eight successes without ever calling the healthy backend. Both faults produced a clean log — which is the finding.
Aether: Real-Time Tracking and Collision Screening in Rust
August 2026Aether: a two-thousand-line Rust component turning a live, unreliable sensor feed into a collision picture in under a millisecond per cycle, built to be embedded in a larger system. Includes one measured investigation — a fault rejecting 16.1% of valid observations, cut to 1.9% by an architectural change.
Systems for long-running work
Two systems built because a body of work outgrew the tools normally used to hold it.
The Canon Is the Database
August 2026A fictional universe outgrew the context window, so it stopped being a pile of documents and became a persistent, machine-readable state store that generation is validated against. State, not retrieval: the distinction is the whole point.
I Use AI to Write My Books. I Wrote the First One by Hand.
August 2026Six years, six books, one world, and the tooling built to stop the machine drifting away from what has already been published. What AI-assisted actually looks like when a human directs the whole thing and remains accountable for every line of it.
The full engineering record, with the deployed systems and the project list, is on the Work page.