practice7 articles
← All ArticlesTwo vendors, one standard: running a real upgrade with synthesis engineering
A real three-day upgrade with two AI vendors exposed the Built/Deployed Gap: controls and records that passed checks but never reached the running system.
The Decision Packet: batching AI agents' questions without rubber-stamping them
A synthesis engineering pattern for staying in command of AI agents at speed: collect every decision they owe you into one honest, reviewable page.
Choosing Local AI Models by Measuring the Machine
Profile a computer, choose local open-weight models that fit, install them safely, and map exact artifacts to each machine with a reproducible workflow.
My design record ruled out agent-to-agent messaging. Six days later I shipped it.
I documented why session-to-session agent messaging would fail, then built it six days later. Why a design record is not a constraint, and what actually is.
I gave my AI agents a chief-of-staff job description. The hard part was the org chart, not the code.
AI agents as chief of staff: how I encoded absence coordination, notification tiers, send gates, and silent-failure validators into open-source config.
I built the conformance validator Google's OKF repo didn't ship
Google's knowledge-catalog repo shipped no standalone OKF validator, so I built a checker for the format's three hard rules. Open-sourced as synthesis-okf.
The Direction Dynamic in ops: driving multi-tool recovery through a single AI session
The technical fix was the easy part. The recovery was tedious GUI work across Search Console, Bing Webmaster, and Cloudflare. I drove all of it through one Clau