Insights

Thinking clearly about systems that can act.

Notes on Agentic AI, architecture, product engineering, and the practical judgment required to build dependable software.

Three graded tiers of a single system rising in tolerance and consequence, with Persimmon marking only the tier permitted to act unaided
Featured insight

Rule, Recommend, Decide

Model selection comes up too early in most agent design reviews. Before choosing a provider, label every step in the production path with what it is actually allowed to do.

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Two adjacent tracks, one a fixed rail and one a jointed arm, with a Persimmon marker at the junction where the fixed path ends
02

Not Every Workflow Needs an Agent

Assistant, workflow, agent is not a maturity model. Each is a different trade-off between predictability and adaptability, and the architectural question is where a process genuinely requires judgment.

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A closed loop of tactile geometric components, with one Persimmon element marking the point where a decision is made
03

Agentic Systems Are a Loop, Not a Model

Most conversations about Agentic AI start with the model. From a solution architect's point of view, that is the wrong starting point. The unit of design is the loop the model sits inside.

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Four drafting stencils laid over a single plan, with one Persimmon stencil marking the review that changed it
04

Four Hats Before the First Line of Code

Claude Code will now produce a plan good enough to argue with. The practice that changed my results was reviewing that plan from several roles before letting anything be built.

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A tangled bundle of cable being re-laid into ordered parallel channels, with one strand picked out in Persimmon
05

AI Changed What a Rewrite Costs

A Salesforce integration I had been avoiding for a year had files past two thousand lines. Rewriting it with Cursor produced a four-fold performance gain, and the interesting part is which half of that work was mine.

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A drafting overlay of a facade resolving into a built elevation, with one Persimmon element marking the measurement carried across
06

From Figma to Tailwind Without the Translation Step

Paste the CSS, attach a screenshot, and Cursor produces the component. The interface work I used to schedule days for now takes an afternoon, and what remains is everything a picture cannot express.

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One machined component seated into two different housings, with the shared piece picked out in Persimmon
07

Choosing Tamagui for Cross-Platform Work

A project this summer needed to ship on web and mobile without maintaining two design systems. Why I chose Tamagui, what its compiler actually buys you, and where I would still hesitate.

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Modular ceramic interface tiles moving from a fixed tray into a flexible composition
09

Migrating to shadcn/ui

Why I moved to shadcn/ui and how its open-code component approach changed the way I build interfaces.

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A balanced architectural stack of tactile material layers joined by a persimmon interface layer
011

Building an Administration Panel: Choosing the Stack

An admin panel has to balance user experience against developer experience. The stack I chose was React, TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind CSS, and here is why each piece earned its place.

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A carefully archived physical network with one persimmon node set aside to preserve its lesson
012

Why I Closed Profile

Why I decided to close Profile Social Network after years of building, leading, and learning as its founder.

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Coming next

A new series on designing production-grade Agentic AI systems.

Context, tools, orchestration, memory, evaluation, permissions, cost, reliability, and the decisions that should remain human.