The Hidden Complexity Behind Scaling Dense Vector Search
A systems-level explanation for engineers, architects, and anyone building RAG, search, or agent infrastructure. Dense retrieval looks clean on paper. You take an embedding…
Essays & Field Notes
The Journal
Essays on agentic AI and distributed systems, and the architecture that keeps them working under pressure.
total
98
span
10 yrs
topics
7
Distributed Vector Search: How Real Vector Databases Scale Beyond One Machine
Why dense search becomes a routing, sharding, and distributed-systems problem Vector search looks simple when everything fits on one machine. It becomes a different…
The Write Path in Vector Databases (It’s a Distributed Systems Problem)
(Where Dense Search Becomes a Distributed Systems Problem) Most content about vector databases focuses on the glamorous part: fast queries, clever indexing, tight cosine…
How Vector Databases Fail (And What Architects Must Design For)
The Hidden Failure Modes of Dense Vector Search, ANN Indexes, and RAG Infrastructure Most engineering teams learn this the hard way: vector databases don’t…
Hybrid Retrieval: The Architectural Backbone Behind Reliable AI Systems
Most AI failures don’t happen inside the model. They happen one layer earlier — in retrieval. If your RAG system, copilot, or agentic workflow…
Context Engineering vs Prompt Engineering
"Prompt engineering" is the wrong mental model for where agents are going. It made sense when the product was a chat box. It breaks…
When AI Gives Advice, It Becomes Decision-Support Software
In late April 2025, OpenAI shipped an update to GPT-4o and within days had to pull it back. The model had become a flatterer.…
Declared State Is Not Observed State
The dashboard is all green. Every health check is passing, every instance reports ready, the deploy went clean. And the system is down. Orders…
Akka Edge: Shaping the Future of Industry with Edge Computing
Introduction: navigating the digital revolution with Akka at the edge capabilities In the ever-evolving digital technology landscape, a significant shift is taking place, with…
Rust for JVM Engineers: Memory Safety Without a Garbage Collector
For most of my career, memory was something I delegated. On the JVM you allocate freely and let the garbage collector clean up behind…