Now

Building

The festival platform for Same Same But Different is the most time-pressured thing on my plate. It’s a backend-first system handling ticketing, scheduling, maps, and push notifications for around 7,500 attendees, with a hard ship date before the festival gates open August 24. Currently in the maps and notifications stretch, which is the last big milestone before readiness work begins.

The portfolio site is also in flight, working through an eval layer milestone. The core question I keep returning to: whether per-claim sidecar scores actually catch the synthesis failures I notice by eye when the wiki recompiles, or whether they’re a false signal.

Thinking about

High standards exist to make difficult things simple.

Reading / Listening

Heavy on AI engineering reading lately. The piece on agentic engineering from System Design newsletter was a useful reference pass on agent loops, context rot, and multi-agent orchestration. Armin Ronacher’s “The Coming Loop” is worth reading slowly: his argument is that outer harness loops orchestrating coding agents amplify LLMs’ worst tendencies and risk producing codebases that require machine participation to maintain. The vertical codebase piece made a solid case for domain-colocation over technical layers, and landed differently after spending time thinking about how agents navigate unfamiliar repos.

Also worked through a few pieces on inference routing, including the DigitalOcean Inference Router architecture writeup and the Pragmatic Engineer breakdown of inference engineering. Good mental models for a layer of the stack that’s moving fast.

Making

Same Same But Different is weeks out. Platform work and festival prep are running in parallel.