Field notes
Practical writing on putting AI to work and building the systems around it.
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One click on Send, six hops, five DNS records and a handshake in plain text.
You press Send and a second later it lands on the other side of the world. Here is the whole journey: SMTP, the servers it passes through, and the DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that decide whether it reaches the inbox or the spam folder.
One click on Send, six hops, five DNS records and a handshake in plain text.
You press Send and a second later it lands on the other side of the world. Here is the whole journey: SMTP, the servers it passes through, and the DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that decide whether it reaches the inbox or the spam folder.
Why the smartest AI agents stop exactly one click short.
The most useful AI agents I build do almost everything, then stop one step short. Here is why the last click belongs to a person, and how to design for it.
One gateway, one hard cap, and the two leaks that cause most surprise bills.
Most surprise AI bills come from a few predictable places. A single gateway with logging, model routing and a hard monthly limit closes all of them.
A workflow tool, a few lines of code, or both: how I decide in five minutes.
Workflow tools are fast to build and easy to hand over. Custom code is easier to test and scale. The choice usually comes down to who will run it next year.
How white-label SaaS adds a new customer with configuration, not a new project.
A new customer should be a row of configuration, not a new project. What changes per brand, what never does, and how to keep tenants apart.
gRPC and Protocol Buffers in plain words, and where REST still wins.
Why services inside a system often talk gRPC instead of JSON over HTTP, what a .proto file gives you, and where REST still fits.
From polling to WebSockets: the whole story, with diagrams.
How the web went from asking "anything new?" over and over to one open, two-way connection. The tricks that came before, how a WebSocket actually works, and when you should and should not use one.
Tell me what eats your team's week. I'll tell you what I'd automate first.
Start a project Remote · PrimeX Meta, Dubai · teams across time zones