The Engineering beat
Software & craft
How the work actually gets built: AI-assisted development, hard rebuild calls, and the patterns that survive contact with production.
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MCP or a direct API? Wiring tools into agents
The same tool built twice, and a rule of thumb for choosing between a direct tool call and an MCP server.
Intermediate · 8 min
Constitutional AI without the philosophy
A working LLM-judge loop with a bounded retry budget and a visible audit trail when it fails to converge.
What today's AI actually costs
The bill moved left, from running software to experimenting with it, steering it, and evaluating it. A field report on where the money really goes, and why so much of it never ships.
When to abandon the low-code path
Why I rebuilt my procurement agent from scratch in week three of a three-month internship.
Notes on AI-assisted development
Patterns that have held up across six months of work with Claude Code.