artificial intelligence15 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.
The migration that was finished until a stranger looked
A synthesis engineering story about Blind-Spot Rotation: how an AI reviewer with fresh context can find gaps the original inventory and checks missed.
What agent memory research taught me about twenty years of notes
Tiered memory for a personal knowledge base: what MemGPT, Zep, and Mem0 teach about structuring two decades of notes so AI agents find the right ten files.
Ask Your AI to Refute You, Not to Review You
AI review defaults to confirmation. A refutation protocol: hostile lenses, uncertainty charged against the work, findings that must survive their own panel.
For AI disclosure guards, the secret isn't the name. It's the approval.
Name blacklists over-block your published biography and under-block real leaks. A disclosure model for AI agents built on approval, provenance, and five tests.
Your AI Assistant's Memory Isn't Actually Yours
Three questions show why your AI coding assistant's built-in memory isn't a durable record — portable, synced, versioned — plus a worked audit proving it.
The Synthesis Thinking Framework: A Practitioner's Guide
Five thinking modes for technical practitioners who work with AI agents daily. A detailed methodology with real examples from managing sixty concurrent AI colla
Your AI Is a Thinking Partner. You're Using It as a Search Engine.
Most leaders ask AI for answers. The ones gaining a real edge ask it to think with them. Here's the five-mode framework that makes that partnership work.
The Tiered Context Architecture: Managing AI Working Memory at Scale
When AI context files grow to 1,000+ lines, they degrade the collaboration they were built to support. The tiered context architecture solves this with three in
When AI summaries become your sources
AI-generated summaries corrupt a knowledge base when derivative text is promoted to source. Not model collapse: no weights train, but the same failure shape.
The hidden lesson of Richard Socher's career: AI makes engineering discipline more valuable, not less
Richard Socher built the research that powers today's AI coding assistants and then described exactly how organizations should use them. His 'managers of AI' fr
From Tool to Team: Managing AI as Distributed Engineering
When you're running multiple AI sessions in parallel, you're not using a tool anymore — you're managing a team. The skills that matter shift accordingly.
Synthesis Project Management
A lightweight project management system for human-AI collaboration. Designed for context preservation across conversation sessions, context compaction events, m
What is Synthesis Engineering?
Synthesis engineering is a professional discipline for human-AI collaboration on complex work. Not just better prompting — a systematic approach with princ...