Writing
Notes from the workshop.
Long-form pieces on memory, AI tooling, distributed systems and the boring backend work behind them.
-
I Scaled PHP Until It Broke. Three llama.cpp Patterns Saved It.
Six llama.cpp optimisations translated to PHP 8.4 with JIT, benchmarked from 1M to 1B records. Half the hypotheses were wrong: SplFixedArray loses on speed, mmap is 7× slower per call, match equals switch. The other half become survival tools at scale.
-
What 16 Parallel Claude Agents Built Around Themselves: Deconstructing Anthropic's C Compiler Experiment
Analysis of Anthropic's experiment running 16 parallel Claude instances to build a C compiler in Rust — what infrastructure had to be invented around the agents because the primitives weren't there yet.
-
The right of an AI agent to stay silent
Production AI should optimise for zero confidently-wrong actions, not accuracy percentage. Abstain as a first-class outcome, self-tasking, and a cognitive runtime are the path to trustworthy autonomy.
-
Seven principles of real memory for AI agents
Atomic units with lifecycle, strict mode with abstention, causal decision chains, AST-based code identity, internal git, scoring mechanics, and negative memory with rule engines — the recipe behind real cross-session memory.
-
RAG isn't memory. It's Ctrl+F with embeddings.
Vector search is search, not memory. Three failure modes — chunks lose meaning, no structural distinction between facts, and no temporal validity — make RAG hallucinate confidently without knowing what it doesn't know.
-
Why AI-Generated Code Is Technical Debt From Day Zero
Patterns that quietly accumulate debt: phantom abstractions, copy-paste-by-prompt, silent error degradation, context amnesia between requests, and decorative tests. Human oversight of architecture and immediate refactoring are the antidote.
-
Your AI Coding Assistant Has Amnesia. Here's How I Fixed It.
Total Agent Memory — an open-source MCP server providing persistent knowledge across sessions. 32 tools spanning storage, self-improvement via error tracking, knowledge graphs, episodic recall, and skill assessment.
-
I Studied the etcd Codebase — and It Changed How I Write PHP
Seven architectural principles distilled from etcd's Go codebase, mapped onto everyday PHP/Symfony work: typed contracts, single-responsibility services, composable middleware, observability as architecture, facade APIs, traceable request paths, and explicit dependencies.
-
ClearVibeArchitecture (CVA) — Complete Guide
An architectural style for backend systems that combines Hexagonal, Outbox/Inbox, Observability, mandatory Feature Toggles, and flow visualisation.
-
VR Microservices Visualizer
Immersive VR tool for debugging and analysing complex microservice flows with Go, gRPC, and Unity VR — bottlenecks in seconds, request flows in real time.