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…
Essays & Field Notes
The Journal
Essays on agentic AI and distributed systems, and the architecture that keeps them working under pressure.
total
105
span
10 yrs
topics
9
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…
Event Sourcing: Store What Happened, Not What Is
Most systems store the present tense. A row in a table holds the current balance, the current status, the current address. When something changes,…
Backpressure: The Honest Answer to a Fast Producer and a Slow Consumer
Every streaming system has a fast end and a slow end. A producer reads from a socket, a database, a sensor, another service. A…
Beyond REST: The Schema Is the Contract
Two services agree on bare JSON over HTTP, with no schema governing it. That is not a contract. That is a hope. A bare…